That's somewhat inaccurate, as far as I know. AFAIK CFCs aren't greenhouse gasses, but make a hole in the ozone layer.
Mind you, at least one mass extinction is assumed to have been because of losing the ozone layer to a gamma ray burst. Still, this probably wouldn't wipe out all life (and it historically didn't.) UV only goes so far into water, and not at all into Earth.
If you want to do better than CO2, may I humbly suggest the tried-and-tested methane? It does some 200 times better than CO2. No doubt some synthetic stuff might do better, but this one's at least cheap. There's a shitload of the stuff in frozen peat bogs in Siberia. Warm the planet just enough to defrost Siberia by other means (e.g., CO2), and you might just see a helluva lot of methane escaping.
Who knows? With a bit of luck we may even do better than Venus. Venus has to do with only CO2, since it lost all hydrogen. With methane we can actually end up warmer.
If that's what keeps you entertained, you can even play russian roulette, as far as I'm concerned. But that still doesn't justify fixing it. If the gun is rigged so one of the players can't lose (it's actually possible nowadays), then wtf is the point of playing against them?
And comparisons to RL are emotional and all, but missing the point. Noone said they have to police against players who play better. I do, however, say that they should police their own fucking devs.
In most cases it doesn't even need active surveillance, but just making sure there are consequences and you fire the twits who can't stay honest. Same as casino employees, for example, if you want an example with real wins and losses and pulse racing. It doesn't mean you'll have three guys watching each other and the blackjack dealer, it means you make sure everyone knows they'll never work again in that town and possibly face prosecution too if they're caught cheating.
And, from what I understand, CCP already failed in that aspect once. "Uh, we moved the guy to another team" doesn't even start to give the right message to either party. It's like a casino saying "uh, it was only one crooked dealer, and we, erm, moved him to the roulette instead of the blackjack table" in a case like that. It doesn't give the right message to either the patrons or to the other employees.
And I don't think any casino there would go, "yeah, well, RL is corrupt too, we can't police it", by the way. It _is_ possible to build a whole business on the idea that it's fair and honest, and at least legal gambling went to great lengths to build and preserve that image. Especially _because_ everyone has seen movies about rigged roulette tables and money laundering via the blackjack table, and expects that kind of thing, they go to great lengths to distance themselves as far as possible from that kind of an image. They don't go and confirm it, since everyone was expecting it anyway.
So, well, I don't think a MMO company is absolutely unable to do the same thing.
1. First of all, I was talking about "fair" in a general case, and in regard to the game, not to your interactions with other players. Even if other players can do better, or you can lose, the idea is that the game itself isn't rigged against you. You can still lose a duel or a battleground in, say, WoW, but that's because you played worse, not because someone rigged the competition.
The idea of "fair" is, basically, that the game itself is agnostic as to who the players are. A "fair" game doesn't even know whether you're Jack who's a drinking buddy of dev X, or Jill who only gives nookie to dev Y if she wins. You're just character Z, with the same chances as any other character of the same class and level. If you have the skill or work hard enough, you win, if you don't you don't, but anyway: it's the same skill or effort anyone else would need in that same situation.
And, as I was saying, that's the default state for a computer game, unless someone actually goes and messes with it. Any way you'd go about genuinely implementing a set of RPG rules, the rules themselves are agnostic. If paper wins against stone and loses against scissors, it doesn't matter if it's dev's friend or the unpopular whiner who's playing paper, it still applies the same rules. The computer only knows it's paper, not who's playing that paper.
To make it unfair, you'd have to actually spend some extra effort there to skew it. Whether by active dev intervention (e.g., dev X steps in to give the +5 Sword Of Ganking to his buddy), or some way in the code and database (e.g., having some hidden flags for who's supposed to win more than normal.) It doesn't just happen by itself. That's all I'm saying.
Getting the rules to be "balanced", now that's a problem. But "fair" just means applying the exact same rules and giving the same chances to everyone. That's the _normal_ state.
2. But if you want to get it back on topic to this particular affair: Maybe because, as far as I understand, there was already a case where a dev was acknowledged to have played favourites, and CCP tried to play it down as, basically, "uh, it was just one guy, not the whole company, and we, erm, made him promise he'll stay away from the game in the future"? Just a thought.
Yes, it's harder to get out of MUD slinging contests than to end them in the first place, but that's why most people try to distance themselves as hard and fast as they can from that kind of stuff. I'm betting that if someone at, say, Blizzard, was proved to have rigged battlegrounds, the announcement would have been "we've fired him and taken steps to make sure we'll know if anyone even tries that crap again" not "we've, uh, had a stern talk to him and moved him around to another team". The message the former gives is "we don't allow that kind of crap", while the later says, basically, "heh, we don't give much of a fuck if that happens."
And once you've given the "we don't give much of a fuck" message, yeah, I can see how it would be hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Actually, it's not that hard a concept. Most games essentially let everyone have everything (suitable for their class), if they just put enough work into it. That's what "fair" means. If you do X units of work (not even do it _well_ or better than everyone else), you're guaranteed a promotion. That's what XP is for example.
It actually works pretty damn well, because you don't have to have a working pyramid. Unlike RL you don't need 1000 peons or more to have a millionaire. You can have half the MMO's population stuck at level 70 for example. (And take a census on WoW sometime if you don't believe me. The bar graph looks like lots of tiny little bars for all levels and a huge spike at level 70.)
It doesn't even have to be all about levels, you can give people lots of other rewards too.
Games are an easy case to make "fair", because you there isn't an actual need to make it "unfair". You don't actially need a privileged 1% minority of rich guys (for bonus points, whose only merit there was being the always drunk son of the guy who actually earned that money) creating employment for everyone else. The game can create any amount of employment or virtual money needed by itself. E.g., a single finite instance, can keep an infinite number of players "employed" hacking those monsters for xp and loot.
For that reason, you don't have to give anyone privileges over anyone else, much less tolerate (or worse: create) blatant nepotism, like the accusation here went. There is no, "see, Jack wins every time only because he's Richie McMoney's nephew, but, you see, we need rich robber-barons like McMoney to keep the economy going, so quit yer pinko commie whining and get back to work. You wouldn't even have a job if it weren't for people like McMoney." Again, here it's the game's responsibility to create the "jobs" and the rewards, you don't need to put some pricks in privileged positions for that.
And it can get as lopsided as it wants to. You can basically have everyone be a CEO (don't laugh, there are games where everyone owns a company), without worrying that noone is a worker. Who cares? You can have millions of workers as NPCs or abstracted as "your company has 2500 workers, 500 clerks, and 100 researchers" numbers. Or you can have everyone be a king, and noone be a peasant, if you want to. Or whatever.
So "fair" is actually very easy. Most games are "fair" by default unless you actively screw that up. (Which is what CCP is accused of doing.)
And, frankly, it can be prevented. I've been on free MUDs which policed themselves against just this kind of thing. Everything a wizard/creator/builder/whatever gave a player or did to a player was logged and reviewed, and it was cause for immediate termination if you went and made the game unfair to reward your buddies. Can't a company do the same? How hard _can_ it be?
Now "balanced" is a more tricky proposition, and that one takes real skill and work. That much I'll admit. That's what separates good designers from wannabes. Kudos to those who can get that right. But "fair"? "Fair" is the default.
The way I see it, even if you don't give a fuck about virtual money and such, it's still a rigged game. You don't have to take a game seriously to, nevertheless, expect it to be _fair_. Especially a game based on competition and PvP. The idea of a competition is basically, "may the best player win", not "may the drink buddies of the referee win."
I mean, I never took chess too seriously either, but if the games at a club were rigged so the same player always wins (e.g., he gets to ask for another queen any time he wishes), then, you know, why bother playing? Or let me use, say, World Of Warcraft as an example. I don't even do PvP myself, much less take it seriously, but imagine that one guild were pals of the devs and got to win the battle grounds every time via outright cheating and having some dev on call to bend the rules as needed. (Which Blizzard doesn't do, but just as a hypothetical example.) Wouldn't it, at the very least, leave a bad taste?
Fixing the outcome of RP events isn't any different either, or not fundamentally. It's still, in effect, a competition, even if an acting competition. It doesn't have to be taken too seriously or give much of a fuck to nevertheless leave a bad taste if it's rigged.
I mean, imagine I'm your DM at a D&D game and said something like "ok, guys, you get to plead your case before the genie, and I want you to RP it. Whoever makes the most compelling case of why he should get it, gets a wish." If all such events blatantly ended up won by the guy who bought me pizza, wouldn't you, at the very least, say, "yada, yada, just give Jack his wish and let's move on"? Why bother competing if you already know it's rigged and that anything you could say or do isn't going to make any difference at all?
Except in this case people have paid some money too, and are paying a monthly fee too. I can see how they'd be a bit more pissed off if all there is in the game is rigged so the devs' buddies win. If PvP is rigged _and_ RP events are rigged, and that pretty much covers all there is except mindless grind, then, you know, why bother playing that game at all?
On the lighter side, though, it does remind me of a Woody Allen quote: "I was watching a ballet at City Center, and I'm not a ballet fan at all, but they were doing the dying swan, and there was a rumour, that some bookmakers had drifted into town from upstate New York, and that they had fixed the ballet. Apparently there was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
It's not that simple. Just being in the right band doesn't mean it'll be habitable, or that life developped... at the right time.
E.g., look at Venus. It's in the right band too, but it's hell. The slow rotation speed means it has almost no magnetic field, and the solar radiation stripped away all hydrogen. The result is a world without water, and with an atmosphere of almost pure CO2. (Well, ok, and a little nitrogen.)
E.g., look at Mars. We're finding that it used to have water, but the world is so small that it didn't manage to retain an atmosphere. Not only the low gravity means that gas has a hell of an easier time escaping, but the core already froze and it ended up without much of a magnetic field again. So solar winds helped strip it of whatever atmosphere it hadn't already lost.
Earth itself paints an even scarier story.
See, Earth started with an atmosphere of mosthly methane gas. That's a _very_ powerful greenhouse gas, about 200 times more potent than CO2. But that was ok because the sun also was a lot less hot. Without the methane, Earth would have been a deep frozen snowball and life would never have evolved.
But then the sun gradually got warmer, very gradually over billions of years. And Earth would have eventually become a hell worse than Venus.
Luckily some of these new (at the time) bacteria had started doing photosynthesis for a living, and turned the atmosphere into lots of oxygen and nitrogen, which doesn't quite act as greenhouse gasses.
And incidentally that _did_ cause the planet to turn into a deep frozen snowball in the process. Luckily a new batch of carbon got spewed into the atmosphere and thawed it again. It took some tens of millions of years for that to accumulate, though, because we're talking a _lot_ of carbon in the air to defrost as snowball Earth. As in, at least one estimate says 13% carbon dioxide. And that was the first scary skirting with complete extinction.
And from there it's been riding a bit of a thin line between turning into hell and turning into a snowball. E.g., if you look at the massive coal deposits from the Carboniferous era, they had to come from _somewhere_, and that somewhere is almost certainly the air. Without the right conditions for this (e.g., the lower sea levels and the recent event of plants whose wood couldn't be broken because bacteria which can digest lignin didn't yet exist), would Earth have eventually turned into Venus?
So basically if you look at it, 10% of the planets being in the right band still paints an over-optimistic picture. You also have to have the right conditions and the right timing. E.g., if the oxygen production had come a billion years later, Earth would now be pretty much the same as Venus.
Are we alone? Maybe not, but don't get that optimistic based on that 10% figure.
First of all, as was already pointed out "only innovative in terms of interface" is deceptive. For the average user, good interface is _everything_. I consider myself a nerd, but even I don't want to spend my time learning the intricacies and quirks of a bad interface. It's just a freakin' next-gen Walkman, I just want it to play music. When I want to learn cool new high-tech stuff I go and learn some new language or programming technique, not how to master a badly designed MP3 player.
About iTunes for PC, I wouldn't know about that, and that wasn't really on my list of priorities at that time. Actually, it still isn't. I like to actually buy a CD, and the MP3 player is just there to play the stuff I ripped myself. As long as there's a reasonably comfortable way to transfer my files to it, I'm happy. So I can't really comment on that part.
To get back to the "only innovative in styling/interface" part, the point is that by comparison everything else was worse. I'm just the average Joe Consumer. I don't care if it invented the wheel or is "only" the first who didn't make it square. If it's better bang per buck here and now, that's what matters. I'm not going to buy a worse product just to make a point about rewarding the early pioneers.
And the stuff I kept seeing as "iPod killers" until maybe 1-2 years ago, simply sucked compared to the iPod. That was the point I was making.
Most were significantly bigger and heavier, and in fact some were freakin' huge. The Archos I mentioned, for example, was entirely too big to carry in a pocket. In fact, it was as big as a freakin' purse. You could put a leather strap on it and call it a women's purse, and a rather large one at it.
For all the talk about iPods being overpriced, most of those were actually more expensive. The iPod was 400-something Euro, while half of those ran between 500 and 1000. In some cases I could figure out the useless gimmic they had extra, to justify the price. (E.g., yeah, I'm so going to pay double because this one has a colour LCD display and can show photos too.) But for most I just couldn't figure out any reason. It's as if some marketting genius thought, "I know! Our product may be bigger, heavier and suckier, but we'll make up by making it more expensive!"
Simply put, without being an Apple fan at all (I actually was squarely in the "Macs suck" camp), I had to concede that if I were to buy any of those, the iPod was the only half-sane choice. I'd have been hard pressed to twist logic enough to justify buying something the size of two stacked 3" HDDs for an extra 100 Euro.
Could be that it was 2001, then, or maybe 2002. Who knows. I can't say I marked the date in the calendar or anything. It's not like it was some major turning point in my life or anything, and it was 5-6 years ago, so, well, I think I have am excuse to be fuzzy on the details. Heck, it could be that I'm mixing up several visits to the store in one.
And yeah, I do remember that everything was very expensive at the time, which is why I got the CD-based player. But I do remember that most other stuff was even more expensive, because the way I remember that story, _if_ I had went with a HDD-based player at all, bang/buck it would have been an iPod.
Actually, it's more like pipelined. The fact that your eyes already moved to the next letter, just says that the old one is still going through the pipeline. Yeah, there'll be some bayesian prediction and pre-fetching involved, but it's nowhere near consciously doing things in parallel.
Try reading two different texts side by side, at the same time, and it won't work that neatly parallel any more.
Heck, there were some recent articles about why most Powerpoint presentations are a disaster: in a nutshell, because your brain isn't that parallel, or doesn't have the bandwidth for it. If you try to read _and_ hear someone saying something (slightly) different at the same time, you just get overloaded and do neither well. The result is those time-wasting meetings where everyone goes fuzzy-brained and forgets everything as soon as the presentation flipped to the next chart.
To get back to the pipeline idea, the brain seems to be quite the pipelined design. Starting from say, the eyes, you just don't have the bandwidth to consciously process the raw stream of pixels. There are several stages of buffering, filtering out the irrelevant bits (e.g., if you focus on the blonde in the car, you won't even notice the pink gorilla jumping up and down in the background), "tokenizing" it, matching and cross-referencing it, etc, and your conscious levels work on the pre-processed executive summary.
We already know, for example, that the shortest term buffer can store about 8 seconds worth of raw data in transit. And that after about 8 seconds it will discard that data, whether it's been used or not. (Try closing your eyes while moving around a room, and for about 8 seconds you're still good. After that, you no longer know where you are and what the room looks like.)
There's a lot of stuff done in parallel at each stage, yes, but the overall process is really just a serial pipeline.
At any rate, yeah, your eyes may already be up to 8 seconds ahead of what your brain currently processes. It doesn't mean you're that much of a lean, mean, parallel-processing machine, it just means that some data is buffered in transit.
Even time-slicing won't really work that well, because of that (potential) latency and the finite buffers. If you want to suddenly focus on another bit of the picture, or switch context to think of something else, you'll basically lose some data in the process. Your pipeline still has the old data in it, and it's going right to the bit bucket. That or both streams get thrashed because there's simply not enough processing power and bandwidth for both to go through the pipeline at the same time.
Again, you only need to look at the fuzzy-brain effect of bad Powerpoint presentations to see just that in practice. Forced to try to process two streams at the same time (speech and text), people just make a hash of both.
I'm gonna sound like an Apple fanboy, although in reality I'm more like the opposite. But it's only fair to acknowledge what Apple did right.
Thing is, before Apple being the #1 player with all the accessories and brand name and all, it was just another player. Everyone could make a HDD based player... and fucked up.
E.g., I remember going to a few shops in '99 to get an MP3 player. (Yeah, one of those "back in my day" tales;) There was the iPod or there were some things that qualified as one or more of:
A) As big as a fucking brick. (E.g., I remember the Archos brand name just because it was the biggest one on display. It looked like two 3" HDDs stacked.)
B) Overpriced to hell and back. (Oh, they had some extra feature ahead of their time, but not worth paying that kinda premium for it. E.g., there were those offering video playback... except they cost more than a decent laptop, which could play those videos in higher res.)
C) Encumbered by retarded world-domination attempts. (E.g., no Sony could actually play MP3, even after they had started grudgingly calling them MP3 players. If you read the fine print, they offered to convert your MP3s to their own 64kb/s codecs that sounded like playing the song through a cheap old digital watch. I'm sorry, but MP3 is lossy as it is, converting it to another lossy codec just gives you basically a multiplication of that.)
D) Were an interface nightmare. (Creative, I'm looking at you.)
Etc.
I'm sorry, I may not be the most hip and fashion-aware guy around, but if I end up with something the size and weight of a brick on my belt, then at least it better not cost _more_. I ended up buying a CD-based player at that time, since it was a lot cheaper and actually lighter than some of those.
Years later I got a Creative Zen, because it was one of those clearance bargains the summary mentions. It's still bigger than a same generation iPod, and still encumbered by retarded ideas. E.g., I can't actually just plug the USB cable in and drag-and-drop the music files on it, you actually need Creative's software for that. Why? E.g., even if I wanted to start a company producing accessories for it, it doesn't have a little connector like the iPod has. The only accessory you can make for it, will have to be connected through 3.5mm audio jack. I.e., either it's headphones or it's speakers, and not too smart ones either.
What I'm trying to say is: even just saying "but iPod has accessories" makes it sound like some random twist of fate, and absolves Creative and Sony and everyone of all responsibility. It makes it sound like some other people just happened to make accessories for the iPod and not for the Zen or Walkman, dunno why, it must be hype again. In reality there was a time where that market was up for grabs for everyone, and the likes of Creative and Sony just blew it fair and square. That iPod ended up king of the hill and worth making accessories for, simply because (at the time when it counted) it was indeed the better player.
I'm pretty sure that Google's 'secret sauce' is a decent search algorithm combined with a user-friendly interface. Users don't give a shit about Google's management, and most companies are successful despite treating their workers like shit.
Yes, dearie, and where do you suppose that search algorithm and interface came from? Out of nowhere? Out of summarily re-trained burger flippers on a 5$/hour wage?
No, all that came out of Google's hiring a ton of hand-picked PHD's, and offering them enough incentives to _stay_ there.
Yeah, the users don't care _how_ that was produced, but the fun part is: with untrained monkeys noone produced something that the users like just as much. Even MS (which isn't the worst place to work for either) hasn't yet come close to having an equally good product. The crowd treating their workers like shit, well, I'm pretty confident that their retrained burger-flippers still can't produce much better stuff than "SELECT * FROM table WHERE text like '%something%'".
The users may not care about _how_ you got quality, but they _do_ care about quality. And you won't get innovation and quality out of retrained burger-flippers. That's the problem. Oh, you may retrain them to produce a piss-poor web site, but when it comes to high-tech algorithms chances are they haven't even _heard_ of them. And you need those algorithms to actually offer quality.
Since you mention decent search algorithms, yeah, everyone could search for exact text matches and some even managed keyword matching... Google was the only one whose algorithm actually included a page rank and actually gave the results most users wanted. That's the difference between just coding a search and actually having people who understand more advanced algorithms. Any monkey can eventually figure out string-matching, but it takes someone with a little more brains and education to come up with the latter. Just taking the cheapest drooling retard off the street and running him through a crash course in Java/C/whatever doesn't give you someone who actually knows algorithms, or in some cases even elementary notions like how a hash table works.
_That_ is what I'm talking about. The ones who treat their employees like shit, eventually end up with just the has-beens or never-beens whose sole markettable "skill" is taking shit. Unfortunately CS knowledge is a whole other skill. "Brown-nose me because I could find a dozen cheaper replacements for you" only really works on those who really know they fit that bill.
According to all studies I've seen, up to 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, and about 2 out of 3 don't know or can't understand the language they're paid to program in. _That_ is the problem. The idiots aiming for the bottom 25% of the scale, are getting people who can barely get elementary stuff to compile... after several tries. You have to aim for the upper 25% to even have someone qualified at all. Someone who can come up with the next killer search algorithm, that's an even taller order.
_That_ is what google did right, regardless of whether the users know that detail or not: managed to hire and retain that kind of upper 5% people. While everyone else was trying to pretend that they can just aim for the bottom of the barrel, in the name of cost-cutting.
Of course, most PHBs like to pretend that that factor doesn't even exist. Noooo, anyone can code a great app, because the nice man from BEA said so. Maybe if we'll just all believe that really hard, it will start being reality. Tough shit, reality doesn't work like reality-by-consensus novels. "Let's all believe that gravity doesn't exist" schemes just don't work.
Oh no, the people in your free commercial didn't have perfect actors teeth. Welcome to the real world Heinz, what did you expect to get for free from amatures?
Well, you _are_ right, but, see, that's the whole rub, right there. The Web 2.0 hype is basically the future is a tehnofetishist collaboration utopia. That a million monkeys... err... amateurs on keyboards can, and _will_, produce something better than Shakespeare and better texts/ads/information/whatever than professional scientists/historians/marketters/whatever manage.
[sarcasm]Authoritative sources and professionals publishing content are soo last century, don't you know? The future is all wikis, blogs, YouTube, MySpace and BitTorrent! That's what separated companies that failed in the bubble from companies that survived, don't you know? You can still forget about actually having a product to sell, the New Economy still lives, you just have to put your money on companies that let a million amateurs cooperate! That's the ticket![/sarcasm]
And if you think I'm a loonie in need of a lobotomy with the above surrealistic paragraph, you'd be half right. Except it's not me, it's literally Tim O'Reilly's vision of Web 2.0. You know, since he's the one who coined and trademarked the Web 2.0 buzzword. No, seriously. You can't make up something _that_ disconnected from reality.
Never mind that in reality the companies that survived were the ones which had, you know, a business plan and a product to sell. E.g., Google didn't survive the bubble age simply because it allowed people to find each other easier. It survived really because it also was an ad provider, and it had a business plan and a product: it sells your eyeballs to the ad providers.
But I suppose that _that_ didn't fit in Tim's technofetishist utopian view, so let's not let reality get in the way of a jolly good utopia.
At any rate, yeah, you _are_ right: what did anyone expect?
Well, the Web 2.0 technofetishist crowd actually expected that it would produce the ultimate ad, nailing the coffin of professionals producing professional content. That a million monkeys remixing each other's home videos, and occasionally someone else's music and a WoW film, would actually be not just top notch, but redefine top notch. They'd show Heinz what a next gen ad looks like.
That's basically the story. It didn't work like the Web 2.0 hype predicted it would work.
Just as a quick clarification, I don't use the term "PHB" to mean any manager. I know good managers exist, I've worked with some, although they tend to be more present in small companies. Or stuck at the bottom of large companies. Kudos to them and they get the same respect I have for anyone else who does their job well. I only use "PHB" when I mean... well, someone who's horribly bad and/or inept at managing.
Sometimes it's not even (just) incompetence, but, well, any other reason for not doing one's job. Some are just focused on getting another promotion, and have figured out that faking it to the superiors beats actual work. Some are plain old corrupt. Some are actually smart, but have other goals than actually managing. (E.g., if someone's goal is just to sell some shares at a temporarily inflated price, there are ways to get Wall Street hyped up even if it's destructive to the company in the long term.) Some are well, caught in childish prom-queen games for their own entertainment. (I know of talks that involved more than one department, which went, for example, "well _I_'m not signing that, if the head of that other department gets what he wants.") Some are genuinely sociopathic and are more focused on causing insecurity and distress than anything else. Etc.
Other than that, no disaggreements there. Pretty nice analogy, IMHO.
First of all, Cringely is... Cringely. The same guy who recently claimed to know that IBM will fire 150000 US workers... out of 130000 total. Or then looked all wrong at a job search site and said IBM is looking to hire 15000 workers... just to fire them right back again. Never mind that a quick ask at IBM or a better look at those jobs (e.g., a job for a programmer on an IBM mainframe, isn't actually a job _at_ IBM) would have told him that they're only hiring 3000 people. He's also the author of such brilliant predictions as that Intel is buying Apple, when Apple switched to Core CPUs. Or the guy who years back predicted that people on the internet don't need more than webpages, email and chat, because someone at AOL told him that's what their users do. (Never mind that at the time AOL was offering such abysmal throughput and latency that it was unusable for anything else.) Etc, etc, etc.
Cringely makes a good living talking out of the ass, so the sanest thing is to ignore him. Just because it was a slow enough day on Slashdot to let him get the front page, doesn't mean you have to take it as news. Have a good chuckle and move on.
Second, well, there's more to Google than having the right idea. They also know how to _keep_ talented people working there, and how to invest in R&D done by talented people. Both are skills lost on todays "your job could be the next to go to India" and "let's fire some people to make Wall Street happy" PHBs.
If you will, Google's _real_ secret sauce isn't even one of good engineering, it's one of good management. And that'll be hard to steal because most PHBs try to just pretend it doesn't exist. They're looking for something else that must be the secret, because, don't be silly, noone ever got rich by treating their employees right and offering customers what they want. So before they'd be able to steal it, they'd first have to acknowledge that it exists. It's like getting your car stolen by someone whose whole life revolves around pretending that cars don't exist. It's just not going to happen.
Even if it were to get stolen, I'm not betting the big money on it being stolen by someone who currently is a R&D guy at google. From my experience, most nerds are not good managers, and don't do well when (self)promoted to management. It's simply different skills. It's like promoting a passionate pilot to be an archaeologist. Chances are his interest, experience, effort, etc, were spent on the former, not the latter.
In fact, the absolute worst PHBs I've ever had to work with... were brilliant (ex)nerds. It's guys who once were able to code a whole OS via the front toggles on a mini, and come with brilliant algorithms that cut a one week batch job to a couple of hours job. (When most of your memory is on a magnetic tape or drum, such kinds of optimizations are actually very possible.) Then someone went and moved them to a job they don't understand and which gives them an ulcer: management.
So if anyone did leave Google with a brilliant new idea... let's just say that for 99% of them, let's hope they can do it alone, because they won't be able to be good managers.
Maybe, but it doesn't matter. The priorities are determined by the ruleset of the game, just like priorities are determined in real life by the situation and your own role in combat.
That is technically true, of course, but going into a battle with the wrong set of priorities trained into being reflexes, is a recipe to get killed fast.
The whole point of military drills is so you can act instinctively without thinking too much. You already know what to do, whose turn is it to lay down suppression fire and who sprints ahead, what to shoot at first, etc. You don't want to scratch your head and think "wait, what was I supposed to do in this circumstance?" If you have to think "wait, what are the rules this time?", you may already be a winner... of an all-expenses-paid medevac trip. If you're lucky, that is.
Anyway, as was said, _if_ you also have some real military training, yeah, I can see how you'd do well. But just assuming that if some kid plays BF 1942 or CS, they're soo learning to be a soldier, like a lot of people seem to do, is just false. With only the BF 1942 or CS reflexes, they're as much as soldier as someone with a level 80 Jedi in SWG is really a Jedi. Chances are they don't even know what the real rules are there.
That was really the whole point: _just_ the game reflexes will get you killed in real combat.
Works kinda well in Day of Defeat. Machineguns are really, really bad news. They are ridiculously accurate, they have an extremely high rate of fire and they kill the enemy in one or two hits. If you played DoD CS-style so that each player has only one life, they'd think twice about attempting to take down a machinegun with a frontal assault.
I've never played DOD, so I'll have to take your word for it. Personally I'd be surprised if _any_ game managed to get it anywhere near right, and one detail right (e.g., machineguns) doesn't even come close to training someone to be a killing machine IRL. But, as I was saying, I haven't played that one, so I can't really offer any informed opinion. If they _did_ get it right, then kudos to them.
Disclaimer: although I did get drafted into the army, and in case of a war I'd be a sergeant, this was a long time ago and I don't think I was some expert even then. Also, I'm an AA guy, and we did less infantry training than the _real_ infantry. So take it with a grain of salt.
That said, I think that games offer an even more distorted view than even you credit them with. E.g.,
1. Tactical priority: games offer a massively distorted view of that. Sometimes stuff that's far away is of higher priority than stuff that's relatively nearer, especially if you're a specialist in some kind of weapon. E.g., as AA crews we'd give a lot higher priority to a bomber that's currently 75 km away than to infantry at 1 km away. ('Course, if said infantry is currently assaulting your position, the priorities change a lot.) E.g., a sniper has a helluva lot of priority even when he's farther away, and for suppression value (and therefore priority) it ranks up there with a heavy machinegun.
Weapons and priorities also are mis-represented in games. E.g., in Counter-Strike someone with an AK-47 at 200m is as good as guaranteed to miss, due to weapon spread. You can just strafe lots and ignore him. In real life that weapon can be aimed pretty damn well up to 300m or so, after which trajectory curvature starts to be a problem. E.g., in most FPS there are whole classes of weapon (e.g., any SMG) which take 10-20 rounds to kill you, and which you can pretty much plan around taking a few hits to get the gunner with a more powerful weapon. IRL even one shot can kill or disable you. Etc. It's stuff which games actively teach you to give a low priority to, although IRL you wouldn't.
2. Tactical Sequence: In a game it just doesn't work. "Get 'em all bleeding first" is a recipe for disaster in 99% of the games. A badly injured opponent can still move just as fast and hit you just as hard. Putting 1-2 bullets in each of 10 enemies still leaves you with 10 perfectly functional enemies. You don't even get "frags" (points) when one of them finally kills you. In games you'd want to kill them one by one, even at the cost of completely ignoring some.
For that matter, suppression just doesn't work in games either. A lot of what we were trained to do in the army had nothing to do with even making them bleed, but with pinning them down until the heavy weapons get them. (Infantry isn't there to kill any more, infantry is there 90% of the time to pin you down until someone shoots something deadlier at you.) If you will, it's not as much even "get 'em all bleeding first" as just "get them to hit the ground first". Not contradicting your "slowing it down first" point, just, if you will, elaborating on it.
Even if you don't have heavy weapons handy, the most basic military maneuver is pin-and-flank: you pin with 2 units and flank with a third. Whether it's squads, platoons, companies or whatever: pin and flank. Slow them down so you can flank them.
In most games that just doesn't work. Pinning doesn't work and enfilade fire doesn't work. When dealing with 4-5 people running around different routes, there _is_ no enfilade and defilade. You can't learn to understand why it's deadly to have the enemy machinegun sideways along your line, when you don't actually have a line they can shoot at. Etc.
3. Using Cover: You've nailed that one pretty darn well already, but methinks most video games are even worse than that. I can think of all sorts of sins of various video games, such as cover not working at all in some. E.g., as an extreme example, in Postal 2, if the enemy can see any bit of you at all, they'll hit you with 100% accuracy all the time. E.g., if you were in a bunker with a thin slit to shoot through, someone with a revolver at 100m will unerringly head-shot you through that slit. You're no better using any kind of cover than just running around in the open.
But generally, that's part of a bigger problem, that realistic tactics don't work well in games and viceversa. Half of them re
As you probably noticed, my 3'rd objection was, essentially, "but spammers could run it through an OCR and then guess at the 1-2 misshapen letters". So you're telling me that then the system would do the same to validate that you're not a bot.
I dunno... it seems to me that, au contraire, you just described a way to make it easier for bots to pass. Magna cum laude.
You even have the exact way to tune it for maximum effect: the guys with the same OCR software are more likely to pass. Even if you don't exactly know which algorithm they're using, you can just try several and see which gets through those captchas more often.
Note however that you don't even need to be _too_ well tuned. If your OCR software misses maybe a letter in each word, you have a 1/26 chance to pass by just picking a random letter there. If it missed two, you have a 1/676 chance by sheer random chance. Those are _excellent_ odds to get a bot through. A distributed army of zombies could create tens of thousands of spam accounts per day that way.
Hate to do this, but maybe you should look around.... at the chicken farm you're in yourself, buddy. How'd you like them economics?
Actually, since you're asking, I like them very much. Compared to any other period in history (as opposed to some utopias that never actually worked), the economy is doing pretty damn good, and the average citizen actually sees some benefit out of it too.
Well, that was if you actually were asking about the economy. If you were going for a metaphor, I'm affraid you'll have to be a bit more speciffic than that. There are about a dozen other possible meanings for it (e.g., as an entirely inaccurate metaphor for urbanization.) Some justified, some stretching it, some silly, and some probably going right over my head. Or maybe you're just upset at the idea of treating the chicken that way -- which, actually, I am too. Or God knows what else.
So I could provide a dozen answers for every case I can imagine, but that would be a waste of both my and your time, not to mention the time of anyone else unfortunate enough to read that kind of a huge post. So, well, a bit of clarification could save us both a lot of wasted effort.
Here's a bit more of economics for you. The shift to less farmers is basically because we simply need less of them. That's been the trend of the last 1000 years straight.
In the middle ages for example, for each grain seed planted you'd get 2 to 7 grains as crops. Yeah, that crappy. Now we get a few hundred. The same surface planted can literally support 100 times more people. Yet even if we had stayed at the plough-with-oxen tech level, we'd still not need more people planting the land. The surplus of fed people can jolly well do something else.
I.e., even if we stayed at the plough-with-oxen level, in 1000 AD, let's say it took 800 farmers to feed 200 non-farmers (soldiers, city folk, etc) for 1000 people fed total. Nowadays the same 800 farmers, with the same oxen, could feed 100,000 people. Yet still only 800 of them are needed to work the land.
But we don't use oxen any more either. Working the land was also a slow and labour intensive process in the past. Nowadays we have tractors and combine harvesters which do the job of a couple dozen humans previously.
Simply put, we have an over-abbundance of grain. We started feeding it to cattle, but even that leaves enough bread for a helluva lot of people. And even those cows and pigs simply don't need that much work any more. There's machinery doing most of that stuff. E.g., you don't have people milking the cows by hand and spending hours churning small quantities of butter any more. It's machines all the way from the suction cups they use to milk, to churning it or whatever. You simply don't need that many people doing that. A few thousand dairy farmers and workers can (and do) feed a country the size of Germany.
Chicken are even funnier: they're raised literally in chicken factories. The broiler chicken race is a mutant which grows in mere weeks to the size of a full chicken. Yes, that's what's in your chickenburger or the frozen ones at the supermarket.
At that growth rate you don't even need to clean after them or anything. A whole warehouse is covered with wood chippings, then filled with freshly hatched (in incubators!) chicks, and they just get food and water down some troughs. Noone even goes in there until they're ready to be harvested. They live in permanent semi-darkness so they won't fight, they have as much space per chicken as an A4 sheet of paper, and they get to walk and sleep in their own shit (wood chippings only absorb so much) for that couple of weeks until they grow big enough to be slaughtered. Then they're all packed in trucks and driven to the an automated slaughterhouse. Then someone with a bulldozer clears the old wood chips, spreads new ones, fills the warehouse with a new set of freshly-hatched chicks. Repeat.
It only takes minimal human work to operate that kind of a chicken factory. Except for picking them and loading them in trucks, everything is automated. (E.g., feeding, heating, the fans that push in fresh air, etc.) Once you loaded it with the hatched chicks it's "fire and forget" until harvest time. A couple of workers can grow ludicrious amounts of chicken per year.
_That_ is why cities can grow so big. We simply don't need more peasants.
Remember that here they're not talking services, lifestyle, etc, when defining urbal vs rural. It's simply based on population. If you're in a settlement with less than 2500 people, it's urban, when it's over 2500 it's urban. So basically if you had 2499 people in 2005, you were a village, two years later a couple of people grew up or moved in, and voila, you're a 2501 people city all of a sudden.
Suburbia is counted as part of the town too, so if you have a 1900 people village with a 600 people suburb, it's suddenly a town because it totals 2500.
To make it funnier, standards of living aren't the same all over the globe anyway. Compare the following:
- In the USA you'd expect that at 2500 people (and even before that), you'll expect -- and in fact _demand_ -- certain kinds of services and infrastructure.
- In lots of parts of the world, e.g., Africa, China, some parts of the eastern block during communism, a village would still mean 19'th century stuff. It can/could mean not just some quaint houses with a garden, but houses without running water (as in, they actually had a well for water, and a wooden outhouse in the garden), milking their own goat or cow for something to eat. And forget telephone, they had maybe one phone at the post office.
Or some are literally tribes that still haven't found their way out of some fucked up tribal society. Some still live in huts, hunt their own food, have a closed economy that doesn't even use money for the most part, and hold witchcraft trials. Literally. Yet it just takes a cluster of them larger than 2500 people total, to count as "urban".
So you can have a community with all modern services and a supermarket counted as a village in, say, the USA, although noone actually works the land there, at 2400 inhabitants. But have a "town" in Africa that's little more than some huts and where everyone cultivates their own crops, because it's 2500.
Heck, even in the USA, some of the Amish communities have grown bigger than the "town" limit, or are counted as the suburbia of a bigger town, yet their lifestyle is rural in all aspects. They didn't get taken over by urban sprawl, they just stayed as rural as they were in 1700, but had enough births to eventually count as "urban". They do grow faster than real urban communities, so it's just a matter of time.
See, for recognizing words, that's ok. You can give it to 200 users spread over 10 days and see what most said. So, yes, I'm not surprised that Google does the same thing, but the catch is: not as a captcha.
It's just about the most idiotic idea I've ever heard for a _CAPTCHA_. Here's why:
1. What about the first person that sees any given word? Do you let them get in regardless of what they type (remember, there is no consensus yet about that word)? Or will I have to wait another 2 weeks to see if my post is allowed on Slashdot?
What about the second or third attempts at a word, for that matter? If the first two guys said it's "goatse" and I say it's "apple", how do you know which of us is the bullshitter? Did you stumble upon two jokers on the first two tries, or am I a bot? Basically for each word there is a sizable window where you still don't know what it means yet. Statistical consensus doesn't exist yet. At that point you're basically stuck accepting anything whatsoever. And since you'll want to use more than one word, that window of opportunity will come again and again. Maybe a quarter of the time you're essentially not yet knowing what it says and whether the user is bullshitting you.
Or in other words, will (A) an attacker just have to try until he stumbles upon a word for which no consensus exists yet? Or (B) you'll inconvenience legitimate users even more than the idiotic captchas already do?
2. It necessarily involves repetition. Otherwise you can't build consensus. So it's actually worse than current captchas. You can still crack them by paying a couple of unskilled workers in Elbonia to just crack capchas for $1 per hour, but this time you can also cache the ones they already cracked. The same image is bound to appear again sooner or later, and then a computer can crack it automatically.
3. Most of the words scanned from books are actually easier to automatically crack by OCR. Yeah, the OCR might fuck-up a letter somewhere, but it's easy to run that through a spellchecker to make an educated guess. Or even just take a random statistical guess. Even guessing at the ratio of consonants to vowels will give you better odds for most languages than the current captchas. So if someone wants to use bots to spam, you've just made his job _easier_.
4. However a good portion are actually harder for an average user. E.g., if it comes from some manuscript in some medieval gothic script, and some worn/discoloured/whatever manuscript at that, I might get a headache trying to decypher it even as a human. Or what if it contains some phrase in cyrilic, greek, or some made-up script? To a machine it looks like just the next word in the sequence. Captchas are already a usability nightmare, this would just make it an even bigger nightmare for a lot of people.
5. It can be deliberately poisoned. Even with two words (one known, one unknown), it only takes an army of jokers or bots who pick the first or second to answer right, and answer "goatse" to the other. You'll still get your majority eventually, but it will take longer and, as statistics flukes work, occasionally you'll get 5 "goatse" answers for a word before you get even one right answer. Do you start rejecting people who said something else yet?
6. It solves none of the _real_ problems with captchas. E.g., they're still crackable by proxy, or by sweatshops with 1-2 guys cracking captchas at $1-$2 per hour. E.g., it still is a usability nightmare for a lot of very real people.
So I don't care how much of a genius he might be on an unrelated domain, or who else uses the same approach... for a completely different problem. Both are here just appeal to false authority.
Even geniuses occasionally get a dumb idea. Tesla, for example, was one of the greatest geniuses of this century. He did get a _lot_ of SF ideas, though, like time travel machines, death rays, thought photography, walls of light, etc. Stuff which can't possibly work. E.g., his thought photography was based on the idea that mental im
... except for the fact that it never worked that way.
1. The state, especially an oppressive one, will always find some way to classify its own actions. For state security reasons, or to thwart imperialist spies, or fighting terrorism. So you end up with a lopsided situation, where they know everything about you, but you know only the non-classified parts about them.
Comrade Piotr from the example can conveniently ommit the 5 minute part where he phoned to the KGB for his weekly report. In fact, the law can actually require that he does. There you go, you're back to square one, because that transparency doesn't work both ways.
How are you going to prevent that? Require that everyone tracks their own life in 5 minute increments? Start suspecting everyone who didn't fully detail every single cigarette break? Plus, we'll get to that later.
The state can also devote disproportionately more power to tracking connections, than an individual dissident can. If comrade Piotr regularly spends his evenings with comrade Vassili, who's spending too much time with comrade Anna, who happens to be the secretary of a NKVD colonel... what does this tell you? Is that a reporting chain, or is Vassili's interest in Anna purely a romantic affair? Is he telling the truth there when he said he's just going there to fuck her, or was he writing his reports at her home? How much effort _can_ you dedicate there to prove that all that, for all your acquaintances, up to 6 degrees of separation? Do you even have that kind of time and energy? And do you want to raise suspicions by conducting that kind of an investigation?
2. Even if it worked that way against the state, a society without any privacy at all is a perfect recipe for herd mentality and mob rule.
The easiest way to keep everyone in line and doing X, no matter how much they hate X, is to think that everyone else wants and appreciates X. That chest-thumping pro-X is the way to be seen as an upstanding pillar of community. Whole cultures and societies were built on that kind of groupthink. Whole wars were built on having millions of people think, "omg, I can't speak against this war, the others would think I'm unpatriotic."
You can have 1000 people who, individually, are against X. Now put them in a setting where they think that the other 999 is unwaveringly pro-X, and indeed might ostracize anyone who is anti-X. Watch them all chest thump and proclaim their unwavering support for something which they all secretly abhor.
The usual way out of this starts with... some privacy. You have one friend you know you can trust, and can maybe diplomatically probe their opinion in private. But the key there is: in private. Noone would do that directly in front of the other 999, and if they did, they'd be instantly condemned by 999 people (who incidentally think the same, but wouldn't admit it in public.)
It's much like, say, a liquid boiling. It has to start with small bubbles, or it won't start at all.
Elliminating privacy for everyone, is just the perfect recipe to create a groupthink that's self-perpetuating for ever.
Do I think it would be worse than our own? Yes, I can claim just that.
Let me tell you a story. An "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. A true one at that. The story of how the state kept all those people in line and not fighting oppression.
Short story: lack of privacy. And literally FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt over what they'll do about your words and deeds.
The side of the story everyone knows is the KGB and GULAG part. Those are true, and were especially true in Stalin's times. But then it evolved into something that worked cheaper and better: thinking that Big Brother knows everything you do. So people started to avoid doing or saying anything that could bite them in the ass.
The illusion was that the secret police has dossiers (the dead tree kind) on anyone and everyone, and that it _will_ come back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Even if you realized that in such a low tech setting they can't know _everything_, you didn't know exactly _what_ they know, and exactly _what_ and _when_ they'll use it against you. Maybe they'll do nothing. Maybe they'll send you to Siberia. Maybe you just won't be allowed to travel abroad any more. Maybe your kid won't ever get a high paying job because his dumbass father got drunk once and complained about the party.
Worse yet, this naturally killed support for any dissidents. If comrade Piotr speaks against the party, egads, you don't want it on your dossier that you sat, listened and nodded. Do you really know if Piotr isn't an agent provocateur? Or if he's just a dumbass, who else in your circle of friends will run to tell the authorities about that talk? Better avoid Piotr entirely from now on. Better safe than sorry.
_That_ is what privacy is supposed to help against.
And that is what "privacy is just a religion" and "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" lemmings just don't get. Sometime, at some point, it may become _necessary_ to do something "wrong" to just freakin' keep your _other_ liberties. If you gave up privacy, then you might as well give up everything else, because you won't have any means left to defend them. If it ever becomes necessary to resist the government, lack of privacy means you'll never get more than 1-2 disidents which are quickly removed or isolated. As soon as someone does speak out, everyone else just makes themselves scarce, if they think the government will know where they are.
If everyone's life was public, the USA still would be a British colony, because everyone would be affraid to even be seen anywhere around those Jefferson and Hancock guys. India would still be a British colony too, because people would be affraid to be seen anywhere near that Gandhi guy. Etc.
Forging an official document be illegal, but cheating isn't. I dont think anyone got throw in jail for being caught cheating at an exam. Or do you know of any actual case where that happened?
Heck, I even know of people who forged or lied about their diploma, and still didn't land in jail. E.g., there was this story on Slashdot about the, IIRC, admission officer at MIT, who not only claimed diplomas from universities she never went to or which didn't even offer that qualification, but went on to actively undermine the whole idea of academic achievement and integrity. They fired her, but that's pretty much all they can possibly do. You can't throw someone in jail for merely being a pathological liar, or we'd have to build jails for all the politicians and marketters and PR hacks, plus about half the journalists.
College rules are one thing, laws are another. Something may be forbidden by the college rules, yet perfectly legal as far as a court of law is concerned.
Cheating is just inherently unethical and for most of us abhorrent, but, as I was saying, a lot of stuff that I find unethical and abhorrent is legal anyway. And unless someone actually manages to make it illegal, like it or not, it _is_ a legitimate business.
Now noone says you or Google should do business with them. But they are legitimate, no matter how much some of us think they shouldn't be.
Prostitution I have nothing against, however neither do I think it should be thrown in our faces the whole time (ok, I'm not a big fan of ads at all).
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm bombarded with.
E.g., you almost can't go to a page that's even remotely game/gold/whatever related, without getting powerlevelling and gold farming ads nowadays. Not only that kind of cheating actively disrupts the game for everyone else, but in most cases nowadays it's a scam. There's a whole class of keylogging trojans and viruses nowadays that simply steal someone's login data. Then the scammer logs in, sells everything that guy's characters have (leaving them literally naked), then transfer the money to the scammer's characters to be advertised as "buy gold for low prices!" Even on Google.
Now I don't want to go into the whole debate of whether virtual goods should be treated as real ones, but it's:
A) just actively ruining someone's gaming experience, and
B) in a dumb destructive way at that. The price for selling those items at the vendor is often 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than their normal in-game value. It's like burning someone's house down to sell the ashes. That dumb and destructive.
Even not treating those as "property", if you put in the balance the joy of someone who bought 100 gold in a game, vs the grief of someone who lost items worth 2000 gold for that, it's a bad trade all around. It's ruining someone's _months_ of time "investment" to let someone else feel rich and powerful for maybe a couple of hours until they blow it on some stupidity at the auction house. They haven't worked much for that gold, so don't expect them to put much value on it. They'll maybe buy a weapon they'll use for 2 days until they buy more gold for the next one.
C) maybe more important, it's rewarding and encouraging activities that are destructive and predatory IRL too, not only in some virtual imaginary game world. The viruses and keyloggers are very real, and often used for other nefarious purposes too, like harvesting bank accounts, credit card numbers, as spam bots, as DDOS bots, etc. It's activities which are already bad as it is, and sadly too rewarding as it is. I don't think anyone actually wants to encourage them some more.
So, frankly, if I look at A, B and C, I appreciate a hard working prostitute a lot more. She's just providing a service for people who want it, and selling only her work and time, not actively ruining anyone else's day for something to sell.
Or I constantly see google ads for crackpot conspiracies, crackpot young-earth/flat-earth creationism, scams, frauds, phishing schemes, spyware, etc. Even Google itself had that piece of news about how many people clicked on a "Is your PC virus-free? Click here to get it virused" ad. It was on Slashdot too.
Meh. I'll take prostitution ads instead, please. No, I still wouldn't buy sex, but, hey, I'm not buying all the other crap advertised at me either. So gimme some nicer ads at least.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of ads at all. But getting rid of them completely is, obviously, not an option. So if I _have_ to see ads, let's have some good old fashioned porn and prostitution ads instead of all that crap, please.
They're more honest than half the rest of advertising too. I'm going to barf if I see one more ad for snake oil that's supposed to solve all sorts of problems that don't even exist, and with made up testimonials at that. And idiot PHBs actually believing that crap.
At least with a prostitute you can know realistically what you can get, and how it would work. Human anatomy only allows for so much variation, you know, and there's only so much that plastic surgery can do. (Admittedly, that's a lot.) You can't claim to reduce TCO 10 times, increase ROI ten times, allow untrained monkeys to write enterprise-class programs in 21 days, solve world hunger, cure cancer, and bring global enlightenment. Everyone just knows that even a kilo of silicone implants won't do that;)
Slashdot Mirror
That's somewhat inaccurate, as far as I know. AFAIK CFCs aren't greenhouse gasses, but make a hole in the ozone layer.
Mind you, at least one mass extinction is assumed to have been because of losing the ozone layer to a gamma ray burst. Still, this probably wouldn't wipe out all life (and it historically didn't.) UV only goes so far into water, and not at all into Earth.
If you want to do better than CO2, may I humbly suggest the tried-and-tested methane? It does some 200 times better than CO2. No doubt some synthetic stuff might do better, but this one's at least cheap. There's a shitload of the stuff in frozen peat bogs in Siberia. Warm the planet just enough to defrost Siberia by other means (e.g., CO2), and you might just see a helluva lot of methane escaping.
Who knows? With a bit of luck we may even do better than Venus. Venus has to do with only CO2, since it lost all hydrogen. With methane we can actually end up warmer.
If that's what keeps you entertained, you can even play russian roulette, as far as I'm concerned. But that still doesn't justify fixing it. If the gun is rigged so one of the players can't lose (it's actually possible nowadays), then wtf is the point of playing against them?
And comparisons to RL are emotional and all, but missing the point. Noone said they have to police against players who play better. I do, however, say that they should police their own fucking devs.
In most cases it doesn't even need active surveillance, but just making sure there are consequences and you fire the twits who can't stay honest. Same as casino employees, for example, if you want an example with real wins and losses and pulse racing. It doesn't mean you'll have three guys watching each other and the blackjack dealer, it means you make sure everyone knows they'll never work again in that town and possibly face prosecution too if they're caught cheating.
And, from what I understand, CCP already failed in that aspect once. "Uh, we moved the guy to another team" doesn't even start to give the right message to either party. It's like a casino saying "uh, it was only one crooked dealer, and we, erm, moved him to the roulette instead of the blackjack table" in a case like that. It doesn't give the right message to either the patrons or to the other employees.
And I don't think any casino there would go, "yeah, well, RL is corrupt too, we can't police it", by the way. It _is_ possible to build a whole business on the idea that it's fair and honest, and at least legal gambling went to great lengths to build and preserve that image. Especially _because_ everyone has seen movies about rigged roulette tables and money laundering via the blackjack table, and expects that kind of thing, they go to great lengths to distance themselves as far as possible from that kind of an image. They don't go and confirm it, since everyone was expecting it anyway.
So, well, I don't think a MMO company is absolutely unable to do the same thing.
1. First of all, I was talking about "fair" in a general case, and in regard to the game, not to your interactions with other players. Even if other players can do better, or you can lose, the idea is that the game itself isn't rigged against you. You can still lose a duel or a battleground in, say, WoW, but that's because you played worse, not because someone rigged the competition.
The idea of "fair" is, basically, that the game itself is agnostic as to who the players are. A "fair" game doesn't even know whether you're Jack who's a drinking buddy of dev X, or Jill who only gives nookie to dev Y if she wins. You're just character Z, with the same chances as any other character of the same class and level. If you have the skill or work hard enough, you win, if you don't you don't, but anyway: it's the same skill or effort anyone else would need in that same situation.
And, as I was saying, that's the default state for a computer game, unless someone actually goes and messes with it. Any way you'd go about genuinely implementing a set of RPG rules, the rules themselves are agnostic. If paper wins against stone and loses against scissors, it doesn't matter if it's dev's friend or the unpopular whiner who's playing paper, it still applies the same rules. The computer only knows it's paper, not who's playing that paper.
To make it unfair, you'd have to actually spend some extra effort there to skew it. Whether by active dev intervention (e.g., dev X steps in to give the +5 Sword Of Ganking to his buddy), or some way in the code and database (e.g., having some hidden flags for who's supposed to win more than normal.) It doesn't just happen by itself. That's all I'm saying.
Getting the rules to be "balanced", now that's a problem. But "fair" just means applying the exact same rules and giving the same chances to everyone. That's the _normal_ state.
2. But if you want to get it back on topic to this particular affair: Maybe because, as far as I understand, there was already a case where a dev was acknowledged to have played favourites, and CCP tried to play it down as, basically, "uh, it was just one guy, not the whole company, and we, erm, made him promise he'll stay away from the game in the future"? Just a thought.
Yes, it's harder to get out of MUD slinging contests than to end them in the first place, but that's why most people try to distance themselves as hard and fast as they can from that kind of stuff. I'm betting that if someone at, say, Blizzard, was proved to have rigged battlegrounds, the announcement would have been "we've fired him and taken steps to make sure we'll know if anyone even tries that crap again" not "we've, uh, had a stern talk to him and moved him around to another team". The message the former gives is "we don't allow that kind of crap", while the later says, basically, "heh, we don't give much of a fuck if that happens."
And once you've given the "we don't give much of a fuck" message, yeah, I can see how it would be hard to dig yourself out of that hole.
Actually, it's not that hard a concept. Most games essentially let everyone have everything (suitable for their class), if they just put enough work into it. That's what "fair" means. If you do X units of work (not even do it _well_ or better than everyone else), you're guaranteed a promotion. That's what XP is for example.
It actually works pretty damn well, because you don't have to have a working pyramid. Unlike RL you don't need 1000 peons or more to have a millionaire. You can have half the MMO's population stuck at level 70 for example. (And take a census on WoW sometime if you don't believe me. The bar graph looks like lots of tiny little bars for all levels and a huge spike at level 70.)
It doesn't even have to be all about levels, you can give people lots of other rewards too.
Games are an easy case to make "fair", because you there isn't an actual need to make it "unfair". You don't actially need a privileged 1% minority of rich guys (for bonus points, whose only merit there was being the always drunk son of the guy who actually earned that money) creating employment for everyone else. The game can create any amount of employment or virtual money needed by itself. E.g., a single finite instance, can keep an infinite number of players "employed" hacking those monsters for xp and loot.
For that reason, you don't have to give anyone privileges over anyone else, much less tolerate (or worse: create) blatant nepotism, like the accusation here went. There is no, "see, Jack wins every time only because he's Richie McMoney's nephew, but, you see, we need rich robber-barons like McMoney to keep the economy going, so quit yer pinko commie whining and get back to work. You wouldn't even have a job if it weren't for people like McMoney." Again, here it's the game's responsibility to create the "jobs" and the rewards, you don't need to put some pricks in privileged positions for that.
And it can get as lopsided as it wants to. You can basically have everyone be a CEO (don't laugh, there are games where everyone owns a company), without worrying that noone is a worker. Who cares? You can have millions of workers as NPCs or abstracted as "your company has 2500 workers, 500 clerks, and 100 researchers" numbers. Or you can have everyone be a king, and noone be a peasant, if you want to. Or whatever.
So "fair" is actually very easy. Most games are "fair" by default unless you actively screw that up. (Which is what CCP is accused of doing.)
And, frankly, it can be prevented. I've been on free MUDs which policed themselves against just this kind of thing. Everything a wizard/creator/builder/whatever gave a player or did to a player was logged and reviewed, and it was cause for immediate termination if you went and made the game unfair to reward your buddies. Can't a company do the same? How hard _can_ it be?
Now "balanced" is a more tricky proposition, and that one takes real skill and work. That much I'll admit. That's what separates good designers from wannabes. Kudos to those who can get that right. But "fair"? "Fair" is the default.
The way I see it, even if you don't give a fuck about virtual money and such, it's still a rigged game. You don't have to take a game seriously to, nevertheless, expect it to be _fair_. Especially a game based on competition and PvP. The idea of a competition is basically, "may the best player win", not "may the drink buddies of the referee win."
I mean, I never took chess too seriously either, but if the games at a club were rigged so the same player always wins (e.g., he gets to ask for another queen any time he wishes), then, you know, why bother playing? Or let me use, say, World Of Warcraft as an example. I don't even do PvP myself, much less take it seriously, but imagine that one guild were pals of the devs and got to win the battle grounds every time via outright cheating and having some dev on call to bend the rules as needed. (Which Blizzard doesn't do, but just as a hypothetical example.) Wouldn't it, at the very least, leave a bad taste?
Fixing the outcome of RP events isn't any different either, or not fundamentally. It's still, in effect, a competition, even if an acting competition. It doesn't have to be taken too seriously or give much of a fuck to nevertheless leave a bad taste if it's rigged.
I mean, imagine I'm your DM at a D&D game and said something like "ok, guys, you get to plead your case before the genie, and I want you to RP it. Whoever makes the most compelling case of why he should get it, gets a wish." If all such events blatantly ended up won by the guy who bought me pizza, wouldn't you, at the very least, say, "yada, yada, just give Jack his wish and let's move on"? Why bother competing if you already know it's rigged and that anything you could say or do isn't going to make any difference at all?
Except in this case people have paid some money too, and are paying a monthly fee too. I can see how they'd be a bit more pissed off if all there is in the game is rigged so the devs' buddies win. If PvP is rigged _and_ RP events are rigged, and that pretty much covers all there is except mindless grind, then, you know, why bother playing that game at all?
On the lighter side, though, it does remind me of a Woody Allen quote: "I was watching a ballet at City Center, and I'm not a ballet fan at all, but they were doing the dying swan, and there was a rumour, that some bookmakers had drifted into town from upstate New York, and that they had fixed the ballet. Apparently there was a lot of money bet on the swan to live."
It's not that simple. Just being in the right band doesn't mean it'll be habitable, or that life developped... at the right time.
E.g., look at Venus. It's in the right band too, but it's hell. The slow rotation speed means it has almost no magnetic field, and the solar radiation stripped away all hydrogen. The result is a world without water, and with an atmosphere of almost pure CO2. (Well, ok, and a little nitrogen.)
E.g., look at Mars. We're finding that it used to have water, but the world is so small that it didn't manage to retain an atmosphere. Not only the low gravity means that gas has a hell of an easier time escaping, but the core already froze and it ended up without much of a magnetic field again. So solar winds helped strip it of whatever atmosphere it hadn't already lost.
Earth itself paints an even scarier story.
See, Earth started with an atmosphere of mosthly methane gas. That's a _very_ powerful greenhouse gas, about 200 times more potent than CO2. But that was ok because the sun also was a lot less hot. Without the methane, Earth would have been a deep frozen snowball and life would never have evolved.
But then the sun gradually got warmer, very gradually over billions of years. And Earth would have eventually become a hell worse than Venus.
Luckily some of these new (at the time) bacteria had started doing photosynthesis for a living, and turned the atmosphere into lots of oxygen and nitrogen, which doesn't quite act as greenhouse gasses.
And incidentally that _did_ cause the planet to turn into a deep frozen snowball in the process. Luckily a new batch of carbon got spewed into the atmosphere and thawed it again. It took some tens of millions of years for that to accumulate, though, because we're talking a _lot_ of carbon in the air to defrost as snowball Earth. As in, at least one estimate says 13% carbon dioxide. And that was the first scary skirting with complete extinction.
And from there it's been riding a bit of a thin line between turning into hell and turning into a snowball. E.g., if you look at the massive coal deposits from the Carboniferous era, they had to come from _somewhere_, and that somewhere is almost certainly the air. Without the right conditions for this (e.g., the lower sea levels and the recent event of plants whose wood couldn't be broken because bacteria which can digest lignin didn't yet exist), would Earth have eventually turned into Venus?
So basically if you look at it, 10% of the planets being in the right band still paints an over-optimistic picture. You also have to have the right conditions and the right timing. E.g., if the oxygen production had come a billion years later, Earth would now be pretty much the same as Venus.
Are we alone? Maybe not, but don't get that optimistic based on that 10% figure.
First of all, as was already pointed out "only innovative in terms of interface" is deceptive. For the average user, good interface is _everything_. I consider myself a nerd, but even I don't want to spend my time learning the intricacies and quirks of a bad interface. It's just a freakin' next-gen Walkman, I just want it to play music. When I want to learn cool new high-tech stuff I go and learn some new language or programming technique, not how to master a badly designed MP3 player.
About iTunes for PC, I wouldn't know about that, and that wasn't really on my list of priorities at that time. Actually, it still isn't. I like to actually buy a CD, and the MP3 player is just there to play the stuff I ripped myself. As long as there's a reasonably comfortable way to transfer my files to it, I'm happy. So I can't really comment on that part.
To get back to the "only innovative in styling/interface" part, the point is that by comparison everything else was worse. I'm just the average Joe Consumer. I don't care if it invented the wheel or is "only" the first who didn't make it square. If it's better bang per buck here and now, that's what matters. I'm not going to buy a worse product just to make a point about rewarding the early pioneers.
And the stuff I kept seeing as "iPod killers" until maybe 1-2 years ago, simply sucked compared to the iPod. That was the point I was making.
Most were significantly bigger and heavier, and in fact some were freakin' huge. The Archos I mentioned, for example, was entirely too big to carry in a pocket. In fact, it was as big as a freakin' purse. You could put a leather strap on it and call it a women's purse, and a rather large one at it.
For all the talk about iPods being overpriced, most of those were actually more expensive. The iPod was 400-something Euro, while half of those ran between 500 and 1000. In some cases I could figure out the useless gimmic they had extra, to justify the price. (E.g., yeah, I'm so going to pay double because this one has a colour LCD display and can show photos too.) But for most I just couldn't figure out any reason. It's as if some marketting genius thought, "I know! Our product may be bigger, heavier and suckier, but we'll make up by making it more expensive!"
Simply put, without being an Apple fan at all (I actually was squarely in the "Macs suck" camp), I had to concede that if I were to buy any of those, the iPod was the only half-sane choice. I'd have been hard pressed to twist logic enough to justify buying something the size of two stacked 3" HDDs for an extra 100 Euro.
Could be that it was 2001, then, or maybe 2002. Who knows. I can't say I marked the date in the calendar or anything. It's not like it was some major turning point in my life or anything, and it was 5-6 years ago, so, well, I think I have am excuse to be fuzzy on the details. Heck, it could be that I'm mixing up several visits to the store in one.
And yeah, I do remember that everything was very expensive at the time, which is why I got the CD-based player. But I do remember that most other stuff was even more expensive, because the way I remember that story, _if_ I had went with a HDD-based player at all, bang/buck it would have been an iPod.
Actually, it's more like pipelined. The fact that your eyes already moved to the next letter, just says that the old one is still going through the pipeline. Yeah, there'll be some bayesian prediction and pre-fetching involved, but it's nowhere near consciously doing things in parallel.
Try reading two different texts side by side, at the same time, and it won't work that neatly parallel any more.
Heck, there were some recent articles about why most Powerpoint presentations are a disaster: in a nutshell, because your brain isn't that parallel, or doesn't have the bandwidth for it. If you try to read _and_ hear someone saying something (slightly) different at the same time, you just get overloaded and do neither well. The result is those time-wasting meetings where everyone goes fuzzy-brained and forgets everything as soon as the presentation flipped to the next chart.
To get back to the pipeline idea, the brain seems to be quite the pipelined design. Starting from say, the eyes, you just don't have the bandwidth to consciously process the raw stream of pixels. There are several stages of buffering, filtering out the irrelevant bits (e.g., if you focus on the blonde in the car, you won't even notice the pink gorilla jumping up and down in the background), "tokenizing" it, matching and cross-referencing it, etc, and your conscious levels work on the pre-processed executive summary.
We already know, for example, that the shortest term buffer can store about 8 seconds worth of raw data in transit. And that after about 8 seconds it will discard that data, whether it's been used or not. (Try closing your eyes while moving around a room, and for about 8 seconds you're still good. After that, you no longer know where you are and what the room looks like.)
There's a lot of stuff done in parallel at each stage, yes, but the overall process is really just a serial pipeline.
At any rate, yeah, your eyes may already be up to 8 seconds ahead of what your brain currently processes. It doesn't mean you're that much of a lean, mean, parallel-processing machine, it just means that some data is buffered in transit.
Even time-slicing won't really work that well, because of that (potential) latency and the finite buffers. If you want to suddenly focus on another bit of the picture, or switch context to think of something else, you'll basically lose some data in the process. Your pipeline still has the old data in it, and it's going right to the bit bucket. That or both streams get thrashed because there's simply not enough processing power and bandwidth for both to go through the pipeline at the same time.
Again, you only need to look at the fuzzy-brain effect of bad Powerpoint presentations to see just that in practice. Forced to try to process two streams at the same time (speech and text), people just make a hash of both.
I'm gonna sound like an Apple fanboy, although in reality I'm more like the opposite. But it's only fair to acknowledge what Apple did right.
Thing is, before Apple being the #1 player with all the accessories and brand name and all, it was just another player. Everyone could make a HDD based player... and fucked up.
E.g., I remember going to a few shops in '99 to get an MP3 player. (Yeah, one of those "back in my day" tales;) There was the iPod or there were some things that qualified as one or more of:
A) As big as a fucking brick. (E.g., I remember the Archos brand name just because it was the biggest one on display. It looked like two 3" HDDs stacked.)
B) Overpriced to hell and back. (Oh, they had some extra feature ahead of their time, but not worth paying that kinda premium for it. E.g., there were those offering video playback... except they cost more than a decent laptop, which could play those videos in higher res.)
C) Encumbered by retarded world-domination attempts. (E.g., no Sony could actually play MP3, even after they had started grudgingly calling them MP3 players. If you read the fine print, they offered to convert your MP3s to their own 64kb/s codecs that sounded like playing the song through a cheap old digital watch. I'm sorry, but MP3 is lossy as it is, converting it to another lossy codec just gives you basically a multiplication of that.)
D) Were an interface nightmare. (Creative, I'm looking at you.)
Etc.
I'm sorry, I may not be the most hip and fashion-aware guy around, but if I end up with something the size and weight of a brick on my belt, then at least it better not cost _more_. I ended up buying a CD-based player at that time, since it was a lot cheaper and actually lighter than some of those.
Years later I got a Creative Zen, because it was one of those clearance bargains the summary mentions. It's still bigger than a same generation iPod, and still encumbered by retarded ideas. E.g., I can't actually just plug the USB cable in and drag-and-drop the music files on it, you actually need Creative's software for that. Why? E.g., even if I wanted to start a company producing accessories for it, it doesn't have a little connector like the iPod has. The only accessory you can make for it, will have to be connected through 3.5mm audio jack. I.e., either it's headphones or it's speakers, and not too smart ones either.
What I'm trying to say is: even just saying "but iPod has accessories" makes it sound like some random twist of fate, and absolves Creative and Sony and everyone of all responsibility. It makes it sound like some other people just happened to make accessories for the iPod and not for the Zen or Walkman, dunno why, it must be hype again. In reality there was a time where that market was up for grabs for everyone, and the likes of Creative and Sony just blew it fair and square. That iPod ended up king of the hill and worth making accessories for, simply because (at the time when it counted) it was indeed the better player.
Yes, dearie, and where do you suppose that search algorithm and interface came from? Out of nowhere? Out of summarily re-trained burger flippers on a 5$/hour wage?
No, all that came out of Google's hiring a ton of hand-picked PHD's, and offering them enough incentives to _stay_ there.
Yeah, the users don't care _how_ that was produced, but the fun part is: with untrained monkeys noone produced something that the users like just as much. Even MS (which isn't the worst place to work for either) hasn't yet come close to having an equally good product. The crowd treating their workers like shit, well, I'm pretty confident that their retrained burger-flippers still can't produce much better stuff than "SELECT * FROM table WHERE text like '%something%'".
The users may not care about _how_ you got quality, but they _do_ care about quality. And you won't get innovation and quality out of retrained burger-flippers. That's the problem. Oh, you may retrain them to produce a piss-poor web site, but when it comes to high-tech algorithms chances are they haven't even _heard_ of them. And you need those algorithms to actually offer quality.
Since you mention decent search algorithms, yeah, everyone could search for exact text matches and some even managed keyword matching... Google was the only one whose algorithm actually included a page rank and actually gave the results most users wanted. That's the difference between just coding a search and actually having people who understand more advanced algorithms. Any monkey can eventually figure out string-matching, but it takes someone with a little more brains and education to come up with the latter. Just taking the cheapest drooling retard off the street and running him through a crash course in Java/C/whatever doesn't give you someone who actually knows algorithms, or in some cases even elementary notions like how a hash table works.
_That_ is what I'm talking about. The ones who treat their employees like shit, eventually end up with just the has-beens or never-beens whose sole markettable "skill" is taking shit. Unfortunately CS knowledge is a whole other skill. "Brown-nose me because I could find a dozen cheaper replacements for you" only really works on those who really know they fit that bill.
According to all studies I've seen, up to 3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program, and about 2 out of 3 don't know or can't understand the language they're paid to program in. _That_ is the problem. The idiots aiming for the bottom 25% of the scale, are getting people who can barely get elementary stuff to compile... after several tries. You have to aim for the upper 25% to even have someone qualified at all. Someone who can come up with the next killer search algorithm, that's an even taller order.
_That_ is what google did right, regardless of whether the users know that detail or not: managed to hire and retain that kind of upper 5% people. While everyone else was trying to pretend that they can just aim for the bottom of the barrel, in the name of cost-cutting.
Of course, most PHBs like to pretend that that factor doesn't even exist. Noooo, anyone can code a great app, because the nice man from BEA said so. Maybe if we'll just all believe that really hard, it will start being reality. Tough shit, reality doesn't work like reality-by-consensus novels. "Let's all believe that gravity doesn't exist" schemes just don't work.
Well, you _are_ right, but, see, that's the whole rub, right there. The Web 2.0 hype is basically the future is a tehnofetishist collaboration utopia. That a million monkeys... err... amateurs on keyboards can, and _will_, produce something better than Shakespeare and better texts/ads/information/whatever than professional scientists/historians/marketters/whatever manage.
[sarcasm]Authoritative sources and professionals publishing content are soo last century, don't you know? The future is all wikis, blogs, YouTube, MySpace and BitTorrent! That's what separated companies that failed in the bubble from companies that survived, don't you know? You can still forget about actually having a product to sell, the New Economy still lives, you just have to put your money on companies that let a million amateurs cooperate! That's the ticket![/sarcasm]
And if you think I'm a loonie in need of a lobotomy with the above surrealistic paragraph, you'd be half right. Except it's not me, it's literally Tim O'Reilly's vision of Web 2.0. You know, since he's the one who coined and trademarked the Web 2.0 buzzword. No, seriously. You can't make up something _that_ disconnected from reality.
Never mind that in reality the companies that survived were the ones which had, you know, a business plan and a product to sell. E.g., Google didn't survive the bubble age simply because it allowed people to find each other easier. It survived really because it also was an ad provider, and it had a business plan and a product: it sells your eyeballs to the ad providers.
But I suppose that _that_ didn't fit in Tim's technofetishist utopian view, so let's not let reality get in the way of a jolly good utopia.
At any rate, yeah, you _are_ right: what did anyone expect?
Well, the Web 2.0 technofetishist crowd actually expected that it would produce the ultimate ad, nailing the coffin of professionals producing professional content. That a million monkeys remixing each other's home videos, and occasionally someone else's music and a WoW film, would actually be not just top notch, but redefine top notch. They'd show Heinz what a next gen ad looks like.
That's basically the story. It didn't work like the Web 2.0 hype predicted it would work.
Just as a quick clarification, I don't use the term "PHB" to mean any manager. I know good managers exist, I've worked with some, although they tend to be more present in small companies. Or stuck at the bottom of large companies. Kudos to them and they get the same respect I have for anyone else who does their job well. I only use "PHB" when I mean... well, someone who's horribly bad and/or inept at managing.
Sometimes it's not even (just) incompetence, but, well, any other reason for not doing one's job. Some are just focused on getting another promotion, and have figured out that faking it to the superiors beats actual work. Some are plain old corrupt. Some are actually smart, but have other goals than actually managing. (E.g., if someone's goal is just to sell some shares at a temporarily inflated price, there are ways to get Wall Street hyped up even if it's destructive to the company in the long term.) Some are well, caught in childish prom-queen games for their own entertainment. (I know of talks that involved more than one department, which went, for example, "well _I_'m not signing that, if the head of that other department gets what he wants.") Some are genuinely sociopathic and are more focused on causing insecurity and distress than anything else. Etc.
Other than that, no disaggreements there. Pretty nice analogy, IMHO.
First of all, Cringely is... Cringely. The same guy who recently claimed to know that IBM will fire 150000 US workers... out of 130000 total. Or then looked all wrong at a job search site and said IBM is looking to hire 15000 workers... just to fire them right back again. Never mind that a quick ask at IBM or a better look at those jobs (e.g., a job for a programmer on an IBM mainframe, isn't actually a job _at_ IBM) would have told him that they're only hiring 3000 people. He's also the author of such brilliant predictions as that Intel is buying Apple, when Apple switched to Core CPUs. Or the guy who years back predicted that people on the internet don't need more than webpages, email and chat, because someone at AOL told him that's what their users do. (Never mind that at the time AOL was offering such abysmal throughput and latency that it was unusable for anything else.) Etc, etc, etc.
Cringely makes a good living talking out of the ass, so the sanest thing is to ignore him. Just because it was a slow enough day on Slashdot to let him get the front page, doesn't mean you have to take it as news. Have a good chuckle and move on.
Second, well, there's more to Google than having the right idea. They also know how to _keep_ talented people working there, and how to invest in R&D done by talented people. Both are skills lost on todays "your job could be the next to go to India" and "let's fire some people to make Wall Street happy" PHBs.
If you will, Google's _real_ secret sauce isn't even one of good engineering, it's one of good management. And that'll be hard to steal because most PHBs try to just pretend it doesn't exist. They're looking for something else that must be the secret, because, don't be silly, noone ever got rich by treating their employees right and offering customers what they want. So before they'd be able to steal it, they'd first have to acknowledge that it exists. It's like getting your car stolen by someone whose whole life revolves around pretending that cars don't exist. It's just not going to happen.
Even if it were to get stolen, I'm not betting the big money on it being stolen by someone who currently is a R&D guy at google. From my experience, most nerds are not good managers, and don't do well when (self)promoted to management. It's simply different skills. It's like promoting a passionate pilot to be an archaeologist. Chances are his interest, experience, effort, etc, were spent on the former, not the latter.
In fact, the absolute worst PHBs I've ever had to work with... were brilliant (ex)nerds. It's guys who once were able to code a whole OS via the front toggles on a mini, and come with brilliant algorithms that cut a one week batch job to a couple of hours job. (When most of your memory is on a magnetic tape or drum, such kinds of optimizations are actually very possible.) Then someone went and moved them to a job they don't understand and which gives them an ulcer: management.
So if anyone did leave Google with a brilliant new idea... let's just say that for 99% of them, let's hope they can do it alone, because they won't be able to be good managers.
That is technically true, of course, but going into a battle with the wrong set of priorities trained into being reflexes, is a recipe to get killed fast.
The whole point of military drills is so you can act instinctively without thinking too much. You already know what to do, whose turn is it to lay down suppression fire and who sprints ahead, what to shoot at first, etc. You don't want to scratch your head and think "wait, what was I supposed to do in this circumstance?" If you have to think "wait, what are the rules this time?", you may already be a winner... of an all-expenses-paid medevac trip. If you're lucky, that is.
Anyway, as was said, _if_ you also have some real military training, yeah, I can see how you'd do well. But just assuming that if some kid plays BF 1942 or CS, they're soo learning to be a soldier, like a lot of people seem to do, is just false. With only the BF 1942 or CS reflexes, they're as much as soldier as someone with a level 80 Jedi in SWG is really a Jedi. Chances are they don't even know what the real rules are there.
That was really the whole point: _just_ the game reflexes will get you killed in real combat.
I've never played DOD, so I'll have to take your word for it. Personally I'd be surprised if _any_ game managed to get it anywhere near right, and one detail right (e.g., machineguns) doesn't even come close to training someone to be a killing machine IRL. But, as I was saying, I haven't played that one, so I can't really offer any informed opinion. If they _did_ get it right, then kudos to them.
Disclaimer: although I did get drafted into the army, and in case of a war I'd be a sergeant, this was a long time ago and I don't think I was some expert even then. Also, I'm an AA guy, and we did less infantry training than the _real_ infantry. So take it with a grain of salt.
That said, I think that games offer an even more distorted view than even you credit them with. E.g.,
1. Tactical priority: games offer a massively distorted view of that. Sometimes stuff that's far away is of higher priority than stuff that's relatively nearer, especially if you're a specialist in some kind of weapon. E.g., as AA crews we'd give a lot higher priority to a bomber that's currently 75 km away than to infantry at 1 km away. ('Course, if said infantry is currently assaulting your position, the priorities change a lot.) E.g., a sniper has a helluva lot of priority even when he's farther away, and for suppression value (and therefore priority) it ranks up there with a heavy machinegun.
Weapons and priorities also are mis-represented in games. E.g., in Counter-Strike someone with an AK-47 at 200m is as good as guaranteed to miss, due to weapon spread. You can just strafe lots and ignore him. In real life that weapon can be aimed pretty damn well up to 300m or so, after which trajectory curvature starts to be a problem. E.g., in most FPS there are whole classes of weapon (e.g., any SMG) which take 10-20 rounds to kill you, and which you can pretty much plan around taking a few hits to get the gunner with a more powerful weapon. IRL even one shot can kill or disable you. Etc. It's stuff which games actively teach you to give a low priority to, although IRL you wouldn't.
2. Tactical Sequence: In a game it just doesn't work. "Get 'em all bleeding first" is a recipe for disaster in 99% of the games. A badly injured opponent can still move just as fast and hit you just as hard. Putting 1-2 bullets in each of 10 enemies still leaves you with 10 perfectly functional enemies. You don't even get "frags" (points) when one of them finally kills you. In games you'd want to kill them one by one, even at the cost of completely ignoring some.
For that matter, suppression just doesn't work in games either. A lot of what we were trained to do in the army had nothing to do with even making them bleed, but with pinning them down until the heavy weapons get them. (Infantry isn't there to kill any more, infantry is there 90% of the time to pin you down until someone shoots something deadlier at you.) If you will, it's not as much even "get 'em all bleeding first" as just "get them to hit the ground first". Not contradicting your "slowing it down first" point, just, if you will, elaborating on it.
Even if you don't have heavy weapons handy, the most basic military maneuver is pin-and-flank: you pin with 2 units and flank with a third. Whether it's squads, platoons, companies or whatever: pin and flank. Slow them down so you can flank them.
In most games that just doesn't work. Pinning doesn't work and enfilade fire doesn't work. When dealing with 4-5 people running around different routes, there _is_ no enfilade and defilade. You can't learn to understand why it's deadly to have the enemy machinegun sideways along your line, when you don't actually have a line they can shoot at. Etc.
3. Using Cover: You've nailed that one pretty darn well already, but methinks most video games are even worse than that. I can think of all sorts of sins of various video games, such as cover not working at all in some. E.g., as an extreme example, in Postal 2, if the enemy can see any bit of you at all, they'll hit you with 100% accuracy all the time. E.g., if you were in a bunker with a thin slit to shoot through, someone with a revolver at 100m will unerringly head-shot you through that slit. You're no better using any kind of cover than just running around in the open.
But generally, that's part of a bigger problem, that realistic tactics don't work well in games and viceversa. Half of them re
As you probably noticed, my 3'rd objection was, essentially, "but spammers could run it through an OCR and then guess at the 1-2 misshapen letters". So you're telling me that then the system would do the same to validate that you're not a bot.
I dunno... it seems to me that, au contraire, you just described a way to make it easier for bots to pass. Magna cum laude.
You even have the exact way to tune it for maximum effect: the guys with the same OCR software are more likely to pass. Even if you don't exactly know which algorithm they're using, you can just try several and see which gets through those captchas more often.
Note however that you don't even need to be _too_ well tuned. If your OCR software misses maybe a letter in each word, you have a 1/26 chance to pass by just picking a random letter there. If it missed two, you have a 1/676 chance by sheer random chance. Those are _excellent_ odds to get a bot through. A distributed army of zombies could create tens of thousands of spam accounts per day that way.
Actually, since you're asking, I like them very much. Compared to any other period in history (as opposed to some utopias that never actually worked), the economy is doing pretty damn good, and the average citizen actually sees some benefit out of it too.
Well, that was if you actually were asking about the economy. If you were going for a metaphor, I'm affraid you'll have to be a bit more speciffic than that. There are about a dozen other possible meanings for it (e.g., as an entirely inaccurate metaphor for urbanization.) Some justified, some stretching it, some silly, and some probably going right over my head. Or maybe you're just upset at the idea of treating the chicken that way -- which, actually, I am too. Or God knows what else.
So I could provide a dozen answers for every case I can imagine, but that would be a waste of both my and your time, not to mention the time of anyone else unfortunate enough to read that kind of a huge post. So, well, a bit of clarification could save us both a lot of wasted effort.
Here's a bit more of economics for you. The shift to less farmers is basically because we simply need less of them. That's been the trend of the last 1000 years straight.
In the middle ages for example, for each grain seed planted you'd get 2 to 7 grains as crops. Yeah, that crappy. Now we get a few hundred. The same surface planted can literally support 100 times more people. Yet even if we had stayed at the plough-with-oxen tech level, we'd still not need more people planting the land. The surplus of fed people can jolly well do something else.
I.e., even if we stayed at the plough-with-oxen level, in 1000 AD, let's say it took 800 farmers to feed 200 non-farmers (soldiers, city folk, etc) for 1000 people fed total. Nowadays the same 800 farmers, with the same oxen, could feed 100,000 people. Yet still only 800 of them are needed to work the land.
But we don't use oxen any more either. Working the land was also a slow and labour intensive process in the past. Nowadays we have tractors and combine harvesters which do the job of a couple dozen humans previously.
Simply put, we have an over-abbundance of grain. We started feeding it to cattle, but even that leaves enough bread for a helluva lot of people. And even those cows and pigs simply don't need that much work any more. There's machinery doing most of that stuff. E.g., you don't have people milking the cows by hand and spending hours churning small quantities of butter any more. It's machines all the way from the suction cups they use to milk, to churning it or whatever. You simply don't need that many people doing that. A few thousand dairy farmers and workers can (and do) feed a country the size of Germany.
Chicken are even funnier: they're raised literally in chicken factories. The broiler chicken race is a mutant which grows in mere weeks to the size of a full chicken. Yes, that's what's in your chickenburger or the frozen ones at the supermarket.
At that growth rate you don't even need to clean after them or anything. A whole warehouse is covered with wood chippings, then filled with freshly hatched (in incubators!) chicks, and they just get food and water down some troughs. Noone even goes in there until they're ready to be harvested. They live in permanent semi-darkness so they won't fight, they have as much space per chicken as an A4 sheet of paper, and they get to walk and sleep in their own shit (wood chippings only absorb so much) for that couple of weeks until they grow big enough to be slaughtered. Then they're all packed in trucks and driven to the an automated slaughterhouse. Then someone with a bulldozer clears the old wood chips, spreads new ones, fills the warehouse with a new set of freshly-hatched chicks. Repeat.
It only takes minimal human work to operate that kind of a chicken factory. Except for picking them and loading them in trucks, everything is automated. (E.g., feeding, heating, the fans that push in fresh air, etc.) Once you loaded it with the hatched chicks it's "fire and forget" until harvest time. A couple of workers can grow ludicrious amounts of chicken per year.
_That_ is why cities can grow so big. We simply don't need more peasants.
Remember that here they're not talking services, lifestyle, etc, when defining urbal vs rural. It's simply based on population. If you're in a settlement with less than 2500 people, it's urban, when it's over 2500 it's urban. So basically if you had 2499 people in 2005, you were a village, two years later a couple of people grew up or moved in, and voila, you're a 2501 people city all of a sudden.
Suburbia is counted as part of the town too, so if you have a 1900 people village with a 600 people suburb, it's suddenly a town because it totals 2500.
To make it funnier, standards of living aren't the same all over the globe anyway. Compare the following:
- In the USA you'd expect that at 2500 people (and even before that), you'll expect -- and in fact _demand_ -- certain kinds of services and infrastructure.
- In lots of parts of the world, e.g., Africa, China, some parts of the eastern block during communism, a village would still mean 19'th century stuff. It can/could mean not just some quaint houses with a garden, but houses without running water (as in, they actually had a well for water, and a wooden outhouse in the garden), milking their own goat or cow for something to eat. And forget telephone, they had maybe one phone at the post office.
Or some are literally tribes that still haven't found their way out of some fucked up tribal society. Some still live in huts, hunt their own food, have a closed economy that doesn't even use money for the most part, and hold witchcraft trials. Literally. Yet it just takes a cluster of them larger than 2500 people total, to count as "urban".
So you can have a community with all modern services and a supermarket counted as a village in, say, the USA, although noone actually works the land there, at 2400 inhabitants. But have a "town" in Africa that's little more than some huts and where everyone cultivates their own crops, because it's 2500.
Heck, even in the USA, some of the Amish communities have grown bigger than the "town" limit, or are counted as the suburbia of a bigger town, yet their lifestyle is rural in all aspects. They didn't get taken over by urban sprawl, they just stayed as rural as they were in 1700, but had enough births to eventually count as "urban". They do grow faster than real urban communities, so it's just a matter of time.
See, for recognizing words, that's ok. You can give it to 200 users spread over 10 days and see what most said. So, yes, I'm not surprised that Google does the same thing, but the catch is: not as a captcha.
It's just about the most idiotic idea I've ever heard for a _CAPTCHA_. Here's why:
1. What about the first person that sees any given word? Do you let them get in regardless of what they type (remember, there is no consensus yet about that word)? Or will I have to wait another 2 weeks to see if my post is allowed on Slashdot?
What about the second or third attempts at a word, for that matter? If the first two guys said it's "goatse" and I say it's "apple", how do you know which of us is the bullshitter? Did you stumble upon two jokers on the first two tries, or am I a bot? Basically for each word there is a sizable window where you still don't know what it means yet. Statistical consensus doesn't exist yet. At that point you're basically stuck accepting anything whatsoever. And since you'll want to use more than one word, that window of opportunity will come again and again. Maybe a quarter of the time you're essentially not yet knowing what it says and whether the user is bullshitting you.
Or in other words, will (A) an attacker just have to try until he stumbles upon a word for which no consensus exists yet? Or (B) you'll inconvenience legitimate users even more than the idiotic captchas already do?
2. It necessarily involves repetition. Otherwise you can't build consensus. So it's actually worse than current captchas. You can still crack them by paying a couple of unskilled workers in Elbonia to just crack capchas for $1 per hour, but this time you can also cache the ones they already cracked. The same image is bound to appear again sooner or later, and then a computer can crack it automatically.
3. Most of the words scanned from books are actually easier to automatically crack by OCR. Yeah, the OCR might fuck-up a letter somewhere, but it's easy to run that through a spellchecker to make an educated guess. Or even just take a random statistical guess. Even guessing at the ratio of consonants to vowels will give you better odds for most languages than the current captchas. So if someone wants to use bots to spam, you've just made his job _easier_.
4. However a good portion are actually harder for an average user. E.g., if it comes from some manuscript in some medieval gothic script, and some worn/discoloured/whatever manuscript at that, I might get a headache trying to decypher it even as a human. Or what if it contains some phrase in cyrilic, greek, or some made-up script? To a machine it looks like just the next word in the sequence. Captchas are already a usability nightmare, this would just make it an even bigger nightmare for a lot of people.
5. It can be deliberately poisoned. Even with two words (one known, one unknown), it only takes an army of jokers or bots who pick the first or second to answer right, and answer "goatse" to the other. You'll still get your majority eventually, but it will take longer and, as statistics flukes work, occasionally you'll get 5 "goatse" answers for a word before you get even one right answer. Do you start rejecting people who said something else yet?
6. It solves none of the _real_ problems with captchas. E.g., they're still crackable by proxy, or by sweatshops with 1-2 guys cracking captchas at $1-$2 per hour. E.g., it still is a usability nightmare for a lot of very real people.
So I don't care how much of a genius he might be on an unrelated domain, or who else uses the same approach... for a completely different problem. Both are here just appeal to false authority.
Even geniuses occasionally get a dumb idea. Tesla, for example, was one of the greatest geniuses of this century. He did get a _lot_ of SF ideas, though, like time travel machines, death rays, thought photography, walls of light, etc. Stuff which can't possibly work. E.g., his thought photography was based on the idea that mental im
... except for the fact that it never worked that way.
1. The state, especially an oppressive one, will always find some way to classify its own actions. For state security reasons, or to thwart imperialist spies, or fighting terrorism. So you end up with a lopsided situation, where they know everything about you, but you know only the non-classified parts about them.
Comrade Piotr from the example can conveniently ommit the 5 minute part where he phoned to the KGB for his weekly report. In fact, the law can actually require that he does. There you go, you're back to square one, because that transparency doesn't work both ways.
How are you going to prevent that? Require that everyone tracks their own life in 5 minute increments? Start suspecting everyone who didn't fully detail every single cigarette break? Plus, we'll get to that later.
The state can also devote disproportionately more power to tracking connections, than an individual dissident can. If comrade Piotr regularly spends his evenings with comrade Vassili, who's spending too much time with comrade Anna, who happens to be the secretary of a NKVD colonel... what does this tell you? Is that a reporting chain, or is Vassili's interest in Anna purely a romantic affair? Is he telling the truth there when he said he's just going there to fuck her, or was he writing his reports at her home? How much effort _can_ you dedicate there to prove that all that, for all your acquaintances, up to 6 degrees of separation? Do you even have that kind of time and energy? And do you want to raise suspicions by conducting that kind of an investigation?
2. Even if it worked that way against the state, a society without any privacy at all is a perfect recipe for herd mentality and mob rule.
The easiest way to keep everyone in line and doing X, no matter how much they hate X, is to think that everyone else wants and appreciates X. That chest-thumping pro-X is the way to be seen as an upstanding pillar of community. Whole cultures and societies were built on that kind of groupthink. Whole wars were built on having millions of people think, "omg, I can't speak against this war, the others would think I'm unpatriotic."
You can have 1000 people who, individually, are against X. Now put them in a setting where they think that the other 999 is unwaveringly pro-X, and indeed might ostracize anyone who is anti-X. Watch them all chest thump and proclaim their unwavering support for something which they all secretly abhor.
The usual way out of this starts with... some privacy. You have one friend you know you can trust, and can maybe diplomatically probe their opinion in private. But the key there is: in private. Noone would do that directly in front of the other 999, and if they did, they'd be instantly condemned by 999 people (who incidentally think the same, but wouldn't admit it in public.)
It's much like, say, a liquid boiling. It has to start with small bubbles, or it won't start at all.
Elliminating privacy for everyone, is just the perfect recipe to create a groupthink that's self-perpetuating for ever.
Do I think it would be worse than our own? Yes, I can claim just that.
Let me tell you a story. An "in Soviet Russia" kind of story. A true one at that. The story of how the state kept all those people in line and not fighting oppression.
Short story: lack of privacy. And literally FUD. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt over what they'll do about your words and deeds.
The side of the story everyone knows is the KGB and GULAG part. Those are true, and were especially true in Stalin's times. But then it evolved into something that worked cheaper and better: thinking that Big Brother knows everything you do. So people started to avoid doing or saying anything that could bite them in the ass.
The illusion was that the secret police has dossiers (the dead tree kind) on anyone and everyone, and that it _will_ come back to bite you in the ass sooner or later.
Even if you realized that in such a low tech setting they can't know _everything_, you didn't know exactly _what_ they know, and exactly _what_ and _when_ they'll use it against you. Maybe they'll do nothing. Maybe they'll send you to Siberia. Maybe you just won't be allowed to travel abroad any more. Maybe your kid won't ever get a high paying job because his dumbass father got drunk once and complained about the party.
Worse yet, this naturally killed support for any dissidents. If comrade Piotr speaks against the party, egads, you don't want it on your dossier that you sat, listened and nodded. Do you really know if Piotr isn't an agent provocateur? Or if he's just a dumbass, who else in your circle of friends will run to tell the authorities about that talk? Better avoid Piotr entirely from now on. Better safe than sorry.
_That_ is what privacy is supposed to help against.
And that is what "privacy is just a religion" and "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear" lemmings just don't get. Sometime, at some point, it may become _necessary_ to do something "wrong" to just freakin' keep your _other_ liberties. If you gave up privacy, then you might as well give up everything else, because you won't have any means left to defend them. If it ever becomes necessary to resist the government, lack of privacy means you'll never get more than 1-2 disidents which are quickly removed or isolated. As soon as someone does speak out, everyone else just makes themselves scarce, if they think the government will know where they are.
If everyone's life was public, the USA still would be a British colony, because everyone would be affraid to even be seen anywhere around those Jefferson and Hancock guys. India would still be a British colony too, because people would be affraid to be seen anywhere near that Gandhi guy. Etc.
Forging an official document be illegal, but cheating isn't. I dont think anyone got throw in jail for being caught cheating at an exam. Or do you know of any actual case where that happened?
Heck, I even know of people who forged or lied about their diploma, and still didn't land in jail. E.g., there was this story on Slashdot about the, IIRC, admission officer at MIT, who not only claimed diplomas from universities she never went to or which didn't even offer that qualification, but went on to actively undermine the whole idea of academic achievement and integrity. They fired her, but that's pretty much all they can possibly do. You can't throw someone in jail for merely being a pathological liar, or we'd have to build jails for all the politicians and marketters and PR hacks, plus about half the journalists.
College rules are one thing, laws are another. Something may be forbidden by the college rules, yet perfectly legal as far as a court of law is concerned.
Cheating is just inherently unethical and for most of us abhorrent, but, as I was saying, a lot of stuff that I find unethical and abhorrent is legal anyway. And unless someone actually manages to make it illegal, like it or not, it _is_ a legitimate business.
Now noone says you or Google should do business with them. But they are legitimate, no matter how much some of us think they shouldn't be.
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm bombarded with.
E.g., you almost can't go to a page that's even remotely game/gold/whatever related, without getting powerlevelling and gold farming ads nowadays. Not only that kind of cheating actively disrupts the game for everyone else, but in most cases nowadays it's a scam. There's a whole class of keylogging trojans and viruses nowadays that simply steal someone's login data. Then the scammer logs in, sells everything that guy's characters have (leaving them literally naked), then transfer the money to the scammer's characters to be advertised as "buy gold for low prices!" Even on Google.
Now I don't want to go into the whole debate of whether virtual goods should be treated as real ones, but it's:
A) just actively ruining someone's gaming experience, and
B) in a dumb destructive way at that. The price for selling those items at the vendor is often 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than their normal in-game value. It's like burning someone's house down to sell the ashes. That dumb and destructive.
Even not treating those as "property", if you put in the balance the joy of someone who bought 100 gold in a game, vs the grief of someone who lost items worth 2000 gold for that, it's a bad trade all around. It's ruining someone's _months_ of time "investment" to let someone else feel rich and powerful for maybe a couple of hours until they blow it on some stupidity at the auction house. They haven't worked much for that gold, so don't expect them to put much value on it. They'll maybe buy a weapon they'll use for 2 days until they buy more gold for the next one.
C) maybe more important, it's rewarding and encouraging activities that are destructive and predatory IRL too, not only in some virtual imaginary game world. The viruses and keyloggers are very real, and often used for other nefarious purposes too, like harvesting bank accounts, credit card numbers, as spam bots, as DDOS bots, etc. It's activities which are already bad as it is, and sadly too rewarding as it is. I don't think anyone actually wants to encourage them some more.
So, frankly, if I look at A, B and C, I appreciate a hard working prostitute a lot more. She's just providing a service for people who want it, and selling only her work and time, not actively ruining anyone else's day for something to sell.
Or I constantly see google ads for crackpot conspiracies, crackpot young-earth/flat-earth creationism, scams, frauds, phishing schemes, spyware, etc. Even Google itself had that piece of news about how many people clicked on a "Is your PC virus-free? Click here to get it virused" ad. It was on Slashdot too.
Meh. I'll take prostitution ads instead, please. No, I still wouldn't buy sex, but, hey, I'm not buying all the other crap advertised at me either. So gimme some nicer ads at least.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of ads at all. But getting rid of them completely is, obviously, not an option. So if I _have_ to see ads, let's have some good old fashioned porn and prostitution ads instead of all that crap, please.
They're more honest than half the rest of advertising too. I'm going to barf if I see one more ad for snake oil that's supposed to solve all sorts of problems that don't even exist, and with made up testimonials at that. And idiot PHBs actually believing that crap.
At least with a prostitute you can know realistically what you can get, and how it would work. Human anatomy only allows for so much variation, you know, and there's only so much that plastic surgery can do. (Admittedly, that's a lot.) You can't claim to reduce TCO 10 times, increase ROI ten times, allow untrained monkeys to write enterprise-class programs in 21 days, solve world hunger, cure cancer, and bring global enlightenment. Everyone just knows that even a kilo of silicone implants won't do that