The "average life expectancy at birth", yes, is heavily influenced by infant mortality. We know from Roman census data after they took over Egypt that it was really really low indeed even that late. E.g., for women it was 22 years.
But that's only hal the story. We also have a ton of mummies, records, plaques, etc, which make a nice sample. We can divide them by the age when they died and plot that. It looks sort of a gauss curve, plus a major spike right in the first years. You know where the apex of the rest of the curve is? (I.e., without the infant mortality spike) In the 30's for the old kingdom era and in the 40's for the new kingdom. That is for men, btw, so childbirth deaths don't enter the equation either. For women it was lower.
So, yes, even if you didn't die in your infant years, odds were that you wouldn't make it past 40 in the old kingdom or past 50 in the new kingdom. Seriously. If you took a group of people born in the same year, by the time they got to 40 in the old kingdom times, you'd be past the apex of the gauss curve and more than half would have already died.
Yes, like any gauss curve, not everyone died at the same age. Yes, you can find 2 pharaohs who lived over 90 years. But that's the far trailing edge of the curve, _not_ the norm. The average bugger would be dead a _lot_ earlier.
As for what they held for an ideal life expectancy (or "perfect age"), it was mostly because their numerologists considered it a perfect number, and partially what they considered an absolute upper limit. In any case not the norm. It also was 110, not 90. I don't know where you got the "four score and 10" number. But anyway, it was what they thought to be the absolute maximum that someone can possibly live, not something that every Tom, Dick and Harry could take as a norm. As I was saying, we know of a whole 3 in several millenia who actually achieved that, and they were considered even then an outstanding exception and achievement, not something common.
And let me give you another bit of info there: because 110 was a perfect number, the phrase "he diet at age 110" was quite common but did _not_ mean literally that. It actually meant "he lived a perfect life." It meant that guy had helped others and the community and very was well liked. It bore no relationship to the actual age where he died. You could die at 28 and have "he died aged 110" written on your tomb, just because you had been a really helpful guy.
That's one thing that screws up statistics when you don't know what it actually means. It can make it look like "look what kind of a long life many people had back then", when in reality they didn't. Egypt was a crappy place, as life expectancy went. Yes, even without the child mortality. It wasn't Rome.
Heck, even in the 20'th century, with all the medicine and hygiene and all, most people didn't live to the age of 90. So if you're trying to tell me that ancient Egypt had it even better, I'll say, "put down the crack pipe."
As I was saying, the western culture as a whole and USA in particular are at a point where we actually _demand_ that a corporation behaves like a sociopath. We _want_ merciless cost cuts, inhuman sweatshops in other countries, etc, if it makes our shares rise by 50 cents or so.
And we have this illusion that they can be sociopaths only half the time. That they'll act merciless to their competitors or enemies, but somehow retain a sense of loyalty, duty and maybe even grattitude to those of us (voters, shareholders, etc) that got them into that job. Unfortunately that doesn't work that way, and plenty of examples to the contrary exist. Ken Lay had no trouble telling people to buy his shares, while he was selling his, for example. But at any rate, the illusion exists and is very widespread.
So by now you probably see the risk I'm talking about: that if you actually gave prospective CEOs an APD test, it may come to pass that the one with the _higher_ score would get the job.
(Not to say that the rest of the world doesn't have their sociopaths, btw, but the culture tries to at least hide it. Asian countries like Japan for example have a more paternalistic-autocrat kind of business culture for example, so sociopaths have to at least pretend to respect that.)
No, not all are psychopaths, but the higher positions _do_ tend to favour those, one way or another. Even if they weren't founded by one (e.g., Hewlett and Packard sure weren't), eventually the owners are gone and/or Wall Street starts _demanding_ someone who'll act like sociopath. And if that doesn't get the Joe Averages out, then they'll sooner or later fall prey to the ruthless.
And if you want to get technical about it, yeah, it's not just sociopaths out there, it's pretty much a split between those and "narcisists". It's not as much of a saving grace as it may seem. Both have exactly zero empathy for their fellow human, both are equally self centered, both are willing to step on your corpse on their way up. Both are incapable of feeling guilt for it. Both don't show much of either paternal or maternal instincts, and certainly not to their employees. So in a way, we're just splitting hairs at this point. It may not be the medical definition, but I tend to see them as basically nuances of being a sociopath.
The technical difference is that the narcisist is mostly focused on his own glory, while the sociopath is mostly in it for the entertainment that comes from having the power and causing distress. E.g., a sociopath might fire half the personnel or make everyone take unpaid vacations when there's actually work to do, just because he enjoys abusing his power. The narcissist might do the same thing because he can get more money or glory out of it. Even if just the glory of seeing his name in the newspaper for doing it. E.g., the sociopath might demand 80 hour weeks because he finds it entertaining to show you he's boss. The narcissist might do it because he smells more profit for him that way, and it's only him that matters, not you. The narcissist may then reduce it to 60 hours if it looks like it'll make him look good in the press, though.
A bigger difference for corporations is that the narcissist is able to plan farther ahead. He's willing to put some long term work and planning into getting a lot of glory and power. The sociopath tends to be focused more on the immediate and short term. Ergo, a lot of them enjoy coming to a company, taking some disastrous decisions, and moving on to the next one. Wall Street loves the sociopaths more because (A) they're more available to be moved in and out for massive axe jobs, and (B) because Wall Street itself has the attention span of a bad ADHD case. It wants action, hype, and big fluctuations _now_.
It must be very comforting to believe that you are not powerful because you are better than those in power. If you believe you have very little power over your own life, the illusion that those who wield that power are sociopaths (and therefore, not as worthy as you) would be quite attractive.
This, however, is just an ad-hominem based on nothing more than pompous presumptions. You assume too much about what control I have or don't have, or what I need to belive. It's not a matter of comforting thoughts, it's a matter of calling it how I see it. When you read stuff like this (or most of the news about corporate America these days), and the unrepentance that invariably comes with it, it's hard _not_ to recognize sociopathy.
Bingo. I'll have to wholeheartedly aggree with everything you wrote there, even if in retrospect it wasn't that obvious at the time. Still, in my own defense, I did manage to eventually figure out that I needed a break, and went on to play something else.
As I was saying in another post, the fallacy there is assuming that it would be the Jane Average that ends up in those positions of power. Except those who end up at the top, male or female alike, are the kind that aren't representative of the John Does and Jane Averages that make up the rest of the population. But that goes the other way too: comparing Stevens to Clinton doesn't really say anything about comparing men to women in general.
I don't know if men as a whole are better or women as a whole are better (probably neither is better), but comparing the sociopaths at the top won't tell us anything about that. The ones at the top will be the ones who _don't_ actually have the instincts/reflexes/education/etc associated with being either the average man or the average woman. You won't find any maternal or paternal instincts there, just people whose only loyalty is to themselves and care less about everyone else than you'd care about the NPCs in a computer game. You won't find any inherent adherence to either male or female hierarchy/clique/whatever dynamics and mechanisms, either, but at most a determination to mis-use and abuse those to one's own interests. Etc. Anything that you might think of as an inherent trait of either males or females in the average people around you, at that level you won't find people actually displaying either. They may fake it, they may use it to push your buttons, but essentially both are a category of their own that's neither male nor female.
More like it won't make any difference, though not for the obvious extrapolation that everyone will make at that phrase. It's that regardless of which gender you favour, there'll be a certain _kind_ of person who makes it to the top. It's not whether most men are better or most women are better, it's that those who end up at the top will _not_ actually be representative of the majority of men or women anyway.
The world today, at least the western world (though I wouldn't be surprised if other parts too) has a very different minority that's disproportionately represented at the top: the sociopaths. It's not even much of a surprise. In a society and culture where we expect -- and indeed _demand_ -- sociopathic behaviour from corporations and politicians, the ones that make it to the top are those who can promise just that: to behave like a sociopath, and take decisions without letting emotions or empathy get in the way. And there are reasons too, such as their being natural actors and having no loyalty except to themselves. So they can put up an outstanding show for the boss and get a promotion, while you're busy doing actual work.
The thing is, what they do has no resemblance with what Joe Average and Jane Housewife does. Only about 1% of the population scores clean over 30 on an APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder = sociopathy/psychopathy) test. We're talking the creme de la creme, the elite among the elite. (To put it into perspective, the average Joe or Jane have maybe 1 confirmed trait or spurious minor manifestations of 2-3, and even those are often just bad habits or benign when they're not accompanied by others.) They're people who are actually more anti-social (in the medical sense) than the hardened criminals in a prison (who tend to average somewhere in the 20's), yet are smart enough to not end up in prison. You can't really look at what a sociopath does and extrapolate it at what the average man or woman would do, nor viceversa.
They're not only a minority, but they don't even function mentally in the same way as you do. Even if a lot of common people do get caught in an admiration of sociopaths and their methods, in practice they couldn't do the same things. They're just not wired the same way.
I.e., what I'm saying is that you can't look at this case and think she's representative for women as a whole. And conversely, those who think that "having women in power would make for a kinder, gentler world" make the wrong extrapolation in the other direction. They look at some of the average women around them and think, basically, "hey, I bet if she was a CEO/Chairman/President/whatever, it would be a nicer world." Well, maybe it even would, except it won't those who end up in position of power.
Just changing the genre stereotype won't make the world any better, as long as the same kind people are left to run the show. What can change the world is (A) recognizing these people for what they are, and (B) having enough checks and safeguards so they can't run amok and cause major damage.
problem of course is when people disagree on what's "hot"..
Which is actually a huge problem. Something as subjective as "who's hot" is probably the most idiotic idea I've ever heard. It's like asking "what's your favourite food" and thinking that everyone certainly likes the exact same dish that you like.
Even people within the same culture have _vastly_ different tastes. That's why all the niche porn sites exist. E.g., as the "Big Beautiful Women" sites prove, there _are_ people who'd pick a 300 pound girl as the hottest. Or as the "Mature" sites prove, some people will pick the 70 year old grandma as uber-hot. Or if you have an otaku solving that captcha he might go for the bland japanese schoolgirl just because she looks japanese, and ignore the gorgeous swedish supermodel in the next photo. Go figure. But that's the kind of variation that human tastes and fetishes present.
Well, I don't think it failed because of the too low price. It was one of those unbelievably stupid ideas that came out of the dot-com era, and you have to wonder what were they smoking when they came up with it.
And it was a PR mess too, when it turned out that it's just a physical spyware product: it called home so they could compile a database of what products were you interested in, for their marketting purposes. I'm sorry, but I find that just as unethical in a physical product as in a program. The way they handled that mess only made it worse, and the security breach where they exposed all the user data didn't help with privacy concerns either. Especially since, again, the only reason that data was there in the first place is that those idiots didn't as much try to offer a valuable service as just run a data collection operation.
Unfortunately this makes it even more stupid. There are many ways to spy on users, and while they're highly unethical, they also cost next to nothing. Spending millions on a physical product and on mailing it, just so you can spy on Joe Average, is pure lunacy.
And in a sense, the CueCat wasn't their product and you weren't their customer. _You_ (or rather your data) were the actual product they were planning to sell to the highest bidder, and the CueCat was just the device to collect that data. The customer, god knows who they had in mind there. As it was the dot-com era, probably some ad provider. And the product, again, was your personal data and shopping habbits. That was the product that flopped, not the CueCat. Was that priced too high or too low? I guess we'll never know, but obviously there weren't many that wanted to pay much for it.
Yes, it could have been turned into something more useful, maybe an optical mouse as you say. I doubt that it would have helped that user data database (their real product) much, though, since if most people just think of it as a mouse and never scan those URLs, they don't contribute much to it.
And it was during the fall of the dot-com era anyway. Advertising money were in free fall for everyone, and VCs were starting to re-discover reality too. I doubt that, even if they could make a working targetted advertising model out of it, they could have possibly gotten enough advertising money to cover their costs.
Then you're not at the level 60 raids if you still _can_ try something new or do an instance with a PUG. See, WoW is a great game at level 1 and goes only gradually downhill from there. But the endgame is a boring repetitive farming exercise. You'll be squeezed in one role. (Try explaining to most guilds that your Priest's role concept at level 60 is damage dealing for a change, then tell me how many laughed their ass off and how many had a tantrum.) You'll spam one icon over and over again in raids. You'll do the same instance 100 times, in the same role, with the same tactics, pulling (or watching someone pull) the same enemies in the same order, spamming the same icon over and over again.
Most other things don't even work, or aren't easy to get to work when you need 40 people to cooperate. Try doing the endgame grind, like in your example, without a main healer and a main tank, and you'll get your ass handed to you in no time.
Or yeah, try doing a tier 2 instance in a PUG. Tell me how it felt to wait for 5 hours until you got the 40'th PUG member, by which time 10 of the first had left because it's midnight already. Then tell me how well it worked when half of them don't actually have the equipment to be anywhere near there, and getting them to work together was like herding cats.
The game basically changes massively at that point. And, sad to say, not for the better. That is why people are bitching about it.
Admittedly, some get really sour about the whole game at that point, as it was basically the bait that got them head-first into that unholy grind. So they'll start hating WoW as a whole, and every single mechanic or quest it ever had. Can't really blame them too much, but it does have the side-effect of making it hard to have a rational and informative discussion about the game. Someone seeing the whole game, from the Deadmines to MC painted with the same brush will get the wrong ideas, often along the lines of "wtf, these people whine about everything indiscriminately. I bet it's no worse than the Deadmines."
As opposed to any other RPG? How many fundamentally different quest _types_ were in Oblivion? Kill X, or find Y, or deliver Z, then report back. That was it.
And don't get me started on other game types. FPS? Kill, kill, kill, find key, kill some more. Action-RPG? See FPS, but in a third person view and with melee weapons. RTS? Build X peons/harvesters/whatever, build a factory, click on build zergling/dwarf/infantry/whatever factory 20 times, rush. The only competition is finding the exact number of those to build for a win, then apply that mindlessly online. Adventure? One single action: click on everything, try to use everything on everything. The only difference being to what ilogical extremes the designers went with those item combinations to slow you down. Etc.
So if the mere repeating the _type_ of action you perform is turning you off, you might as well quit gaming completely. Seriously.
What makes an RPG good, though, are gameply, story, setting, etc. E.g., in Oblivion technically the Fighters' Guild quest with the goblin village is just another "Find. Loot. Kill. Report back." quest, but in practice it was one spooky experience and it gave you a part of the story. E.g., the Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion again were, after all, techically "Find. Loot. Kill. Report back." quests all right, but that was one spooky story arc towards the end. If anyone could look at that disembowelled guy hanged upside down and think only "ok, quest delivered", then they just lack the imagination for an RPG. (I'd get into more details, but it's already bordering on major spoilers.)
And so it is with MMOs too. Just lumping action types into categories is like saying "wtf, there are only 2 tree types here" and missing the forest completely, as you're busy categorizing the trees. Admittedly, _most_ MMOs are full of mass-produced crap (EQ2's or SWG's quests come to mind, for example), but WoW actually gives you a piece of story with a logical reason why you're doing that stuff.
Especially at low levels it's actually better in that aspect than a lot of single-player RPGs. See, about half the SP RPGs took Hollywood's whole "hero's journey" recipe literally (beats using their own brains to come up with something new) and stretched it to fill anywhere between 10 and 100 hours with it. But that means that the "looky, he's an everyman just like you" part that might have took 10 minutes in an action movie, becomes hours of doing mundane non-interesting crap that has nothing to do with the story later. Not so in WoW. Sure, the newbie quest arcs aren't world-saving class, but they're at least logical, make sense on their own, and do make you feel like being a part of something and doing something useful. And they tell you a bit of the world's story too.
The ultimate purpose of PR or marketting is to sell a product. That's it. That's why we pay those people.
In the over-production economy of today it's damn easy to produce lots of anything, but it's hard to sell it. Insert your favourite product and major corporation manufacturing it, and it would be trivial for them to ramp their production to the point where it exceeds world demand. Nike or Adidas could swamp the world in sports shoes, Samsung could bury the world in TVs, and Coca Cola could easily ramp its production to the point where the whole human species could drink only that. That's not the problem. The problem is selling that stuff.
_That_ is the problem that marketting and PR were supposed to solve. Plain and simple. That's why their clients pay for their services.
A marketting or PR campaign whose backlash actually hurts product sales (e.g., Daikatana and the massive backlash to the "John Romero will make you his bitch" campaign), is plain and simple a flop. I don't know how you want to redefine PR's job, but from the client's point of view, he didn't get _his_ problem solved: selling more products. That's the real problem he had and needed solved. Anything else is just missing the point and solving the wrong problem.
Just exposure is damn easy to get. You only need to fund a spam campaign or something equally stupid, and you'll get all the negative exposure you can possibly hope for. Or get your products to fail in some spectacular way. (Incendiary laptops with Sony batteries, anyone?) That'll get you in everyone's head. But that's not the exposure anyone actually wants.
The trick is getting the kind of exposure that makes people actually want to buy the product. You need to get people to associate product with being cool, trendy, hip, or just having some benefit out of it. Stuff that makes them want to buy product X instead of product Y. (E.g., make them want Coca Cola instead of Pepsi or water from the tap.) That's really what the client pays for, and that's why he pays trained experts instead of just doing some hare-brained publicity stunt himself.
Isolating half of the issue as "only that's my job, and it doesn't involve whether or not it helps you" is missing the point. Saying "my job is to create market awareness, it's not my job whether it also helps your business or kill it" is as stupid as hearing a surgeon say, "well, my job is only to cut you open, not to actually remove your appendix and/or make sure you survive."
However, you can't really claim malice on behalf of Symantec et al. (Well, maybe you can, but that seems to have more in common with gratuitous Microsoft-bashing - logic along the lines of "We think $COMPANY_NAME software is badly written, badly written software is evil, therefore $COMPANY_NAME is evil.") Yeah, their software sucks, but there's no evidence that a team of engineers at Symantec sat down and said "How can we make our software crash machines, corrupt data and turn computers into zombie systems?"
I.e., Hanlon's Razor fully applies: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, yeah, rest assured that most of us don't think that Symantec or MacAffee have malicious intent there. Most of us are fully aware that they're just incompetent, and hire the cheapest incompetents:P
Even so, I would love to have one and I imagine most people would. I just wouldn't want to pay for it!
Well, see, that IRL is actually the whole issue and measure of a product's worth: whether you'd pay the price for it, or not.
Because if we're talking as in "well, if it was free of charge, I'd get one", then you've covered pretty much everything in that category. I know wouldn't refuse a lot of things, if they were free, even if they're bloody stupid and/or I have no intention of using them more than once or twice. But if they cost 0$, hey, I can just chuck it in the garbage bin later and I've lost nothing, right?
The problem is that IRL most things aren't free, and bang/buck is actually a very important criterion. There's a moment when you look at a toy and at it's price tag, and decide, "gee, it would be bloody _stupid_ to pay _that_ much for that." And many a product ends up a dud not because it's a stupid product per se, but because it's just not worth the price tag it comes with.
And that's where the Segway failed. You're not the only one who wouldn't mind one for free. I wouldn't either. I don't think much of it as a means of transportation, but, hey, it might make a good high-tech toy to play once or twice with. But when you slap a $5000 price tag on that toy, it start's looking like a stupid toy for people with more money than brains. I could even afford that price very easily, but looking at it from a bang-per-buck perspective, it's entirely too little bang for that kind of buck. I can easily think a _lot_ of other stuff to blow my money on, that would be more useful, fun, or whatever.
Don't underestimate how disconnected from reality or logic conspiracy theorists can be. There _are_ people who believe that PC viruses are written by antivirus companies, human/animal diseases are created in the lab by big pharma corporations, fires are started by the firemen, etc. It's the "follow the money" kind of conspiracy theory. And don't get me wrong, "follow the money" is generally good advice, but some people are too stupid or too schizophrenic to actually successfully follw the money... or any coherent train of thought, for that matter. So they arrive at such stupidities instead.
No, especially if you _do_ follow the money, that's a dumb analogy. Yes, please do follow the money:
- Sony's music division makes money by, you know, selling CDs. The Sony "rootkit" was a piece of copy-protection software which was supposed to help sell more CDs. It wasn't just some piece of wanton malware, and indeed the malware uses were simply because it was designed and programmed by the cheapest incompetent monekys. But at any rate, its purpose was to make more money for Sony.
- This codec is just a wanton piece of malware, that doesn't seem to serve any particular purpose other than disabling a PC's protection. It doesn't even install its own malicious payload, it just opens the PC up for whoever gets there next. It doesn't copy-protect DVDs, it doesn't even track copyright infringers, it doesn't do _anything_ which would make more money for the MPAA. It's just a piece of wanton malware.
I.e., if you do follow the money, Sony's rootkit had a financial reason behind it, while linking this codec to MPAA _doesn't_ produce or promise any obvious benefit for the MPAA. I.e., yes, I'll side with the grand-parent post. Whoever was the stupid fanboy that submitted that inflamatory summary, _is_ a retard and doesn't present any obvious link between that and the MPAA. It's just an inflamatory statement pulled out of the ass, with not even conjecture to back it up.
Now I know it's Slashdot and "MPAA is evil" bitching and moaning is the norm and good for karma. But even then I do prefer the kind which can actually put a coherent rationale behind that bitching. You know, something based on facts and logic, and where the extrapolations have at least a hint of plausibility. And this summary just doesn't make that grade. It's just something pulled out of the ass, and badly at that.
Let me tell you all (again) why the USSR communism and some other totalitarian regimes worked.
Yes, it involved the secret police, but it didn't always mean Stalin's executing and deporting millions. Eventually it evolved into something more subtle: making people affraid that the Big Brother knows what they're up to, and God knows when it will come back to bite them in the ass.
The idea was that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing stuff you've said, stuff you've done, people you've associated with, and, to stay on topic, if you've been reported as reading subversive literature or listening to capitalist radio broadcasts. The Big Brother would have _loved_ to know if you're reading The Road To Serfdom instead of the filtered news in Pravda, or if you're listening to BBC instead of the government propaganda stations. And then one day it could have consequences ranging from outright landing in jail, to more subtle stuff like never getting a promotion because you're an untrustworthy, subversive element. Or associated with one such person.
Now bear in mind that the USSR version was the low tech version, involving literally paper pages in a cardboard binder, and sketchy reports by a limited number of informants and agents provocateurs. That was still enough to create a nation-wide chilling effect, and keep people doing nothing rather than face the consequences. Even minor things which probably wouldn't have actually warranted any repressive action, people rather just didn't do them. Once you get the paranoia and, literally, the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, people start trying to not go on record as having done anything that could possibly look bad.
It's not even a case of "it works just as well, and cheaper", it actually works _better_ than Stalin's brutal massacres and creates less martyrs. If people don't know when or how you'll use that, they'll watch themselves all the better. They'll even create their own imaginary proof where no actual oppression existed. E.g., maybe the last round of being rejected for a better paid job or for a trip abroad had something to do with that drunken chat to comrade Piotr, where you expressed dissatisfaction with the government? You don't know. Better not do it again, just in case.
How does that apply here? Well, easy. The more I read about such data collection, the more it starts to sound like a high-tech version of it. It's getting to the point where someone there knows who you've talked to on the phone, what things you searched online, what TV/radio programmes you've watched/listened to. And it has the potential to create a massive chilling effect.
And before someone jumps in with "we're America, we'd never let something like that happen", well, it's already happening. Even without government intervention, the thought that the next boss might google them, makes a lot of people go to insane lengths to either stay anonymous, or to say only bland non-offensive things that hopefully can't come back to bite them in the ass at the next job interview.
Now imagine that there's no way to stay anonymous there. There's a mountain of data that points at _your_ house. The phone calls you've made, the phone calls you've received, the news stations you listen to, the strings you've searched for, etc.
In all fairness though, the X1900XTX doesn't play DVD's any better than a two-year-old card. If you are just interested in DVDs and light gaming, you can get a smaller card and save some money in the process as well. The X1900XTX is loud because of its 3D acceleration features, not because of its DVD playing features.
That's insightful indeed, but if you _are_ interested in 3D gaming, then (A) your main gaming rig will be too loud, and (B) just getting a DVD player might still be cheaper than building a silent second computer.
- The OS alone for that second computer might set you back more than the cost of a cheap DVD player.
- Add a graphics card, even a low end X300 at that, and some RAM, and by now you're a little over that $200 mark they quote for a good DVD player.
- Add a CPU. And if you want really silent there, you're probably going to end up with a Dothan or Core, and they cost a fair bit. (Yes, you can silence an Athlon too, but that involves a copper heatsink, a high end Papst or Panaflo fan, and some rubber pins and mats, so there go even more money.) You'll need a motherboard for it too, at that, and the Dothan ones are anything but cheap.
- Now you're up to the PSU and case, and let's be frank: your average "silent" PSU is actually really noisy. The ones which really are silent, e.g., the Antec Phantom, also cost a bit more than the average. And if you went with the Phantom and a fanless graphics card, you probably don't want to stuff them in your average no-name case either, since then the case's fans will bring you back to square one. No, you'll want a good mesh case, so natural convection does most of the work.
Alternately you could go with a Zallman TNN (Totally No Noise) case which acts as a heatsink itself. Those are as quiet as it possibly can get. Unfortunately they also cost several hundreds of dollars even for the smallest and cheapest model.
- Hard drives aren't that expensive nowadays, but if you go for a good silent Samsung and some rubber mounts, it's going to be a bit more expensive than just chucking in your old 60 GB drive from the ball bearing era and sounding like a high powered drill. For _really_ silent you might even have to go with a Flash drive or RAM drive, at which point it costs a mint.
- And of course, you need the DVD drive itself. Again, they're anything but expensive these days, but it still needs to be bought.
- You'll also want a good graphics card, since, honestly, it's a media centre, not a white noise and squeak machine. While a cheap ATI card or even onboard graphics may be perfect for DVDs, but if you'll pardon the obscenity, your average onboard sound system sucks hairy ass. The signal to noise ratio of most mainboards is a sick joke, and a lot tend to squeak or click each time anything happens on the bus. Lack of shielding tends to do that. It just won't do as a high-end DVD player substitute. So you're going to end up with an Audigy 2 or insert your favourite other high-end card.
Well, you get the idea by now. By the time you put together all that, with care that you keep your noise down, you could have bought 2-3 DVD players for the same money.
I'm the "proud" owner of an X1900XTX and let me just say they're very very very loud.
It's hard to explain what's stupidly wrong with the design without needing drawings, so bear with me. Let's just say that as the turbine sucks air from one side (as opposed to above and below) and blows it out the other, this necessarily creates a narrowed bottleneck in the airflow. The air can only enter a centrifugal turbine from above or below, so that incoming airflow has to be narrowed into a duct going under the turbine. This however creates more noise (as the air moves faster through that narrowed space) and needs the turbine to spin faster (to make up for the extra drag factor of that narrow duct).
Seriously, I just have to wonder (A) if that stupidity was designed by some graphics artist or marketroid instead of an engineer, (B) WTF were they smoking at the time? Must have been some really good stuff. And (C) where can I buy some of that stuff? And don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a good graphics artist or marketting expert when they work in their own field, but engineering is best left to real engineers.
You can somewhat silence it by replacing the stock cooler with a Zalman or Arctic Cooling cooler, but don't expect miracles. It's a very very hot chip, so even a well engineered fan and heatsink still need to move a lot of air to keep it cool. It will just move it down a notch from "jet engine take-off" levels to merely "loud fan" levels.
I've managed to reduce it even more by also involving a good case (lots of airflow without needing insane number of fans) and some generous soundproofing of that case, but still... it's at best described as "low noise", not "silent". It's ok to play games with the headphones on, but it's not quite what I'd want in a movie player.
And here's why not: movies have a wide range of volumes, ranging from muffled footsteps and whispered conversations to shrieks and explosions. Even if you got your PC to be only 30 dB or so, that's the noise level with which the low volume parts of the movie will have to compete. If a whispered conversation there is, say, only 40 dB or so, on top of your computer's noise it will be at a lousy 10 dB signal-to-noise ratio. It's already in the domain where you may have to rewind to listen again, because it's hard to understand what they're saying.
Well, that's just the thing. The kind of fucktards who _need_ to pretend they're a horny teenage female to cover for their social ineptitude, are too socially inept to function in RL society too. The kind of idiot who can't ask anything nicely in a MMO, I just can't see him/her being the polite and considerate kind IRL either. The kind who just has to come out as knowing everything better than you do, again, you can see the same specimens IRL every day. And the kind who's an ivory-tower "everyone except me is an idiot" kind of loser, trust me, they're not like that only online. You can find them IRL too building convoluted theories about why everyone else avoids their nasty presence.
And ironically enough, this sad kind of loser is the first who'll throw around stuff like "Do yourself a favor and get a life. A real life, with real friends. Not "online friends"." It's exactly this kind of loser who thinks that throwing around enough insults can mask their own inadequacies. Ironic, because if they were capable of functioning in society IRL, they wouldn't find themselves ostracized online either.
So, yes, by all means, take your own advice: "Do yourself a favor and get a life. A real life, with real friends. Not "online friends"." Aptly put, really. Do that. Then you might get just enough social skill to be accepted in a group, online or offline, without having to pretend you're a horny female teen.
Then you might actually be able to have _friends_, online or offline, as you may choose. Not just horny men willing to overlook your obvious social ineptitude and crap personality, but real friends. There's a massive difference between the two. But I don't expect that you've found it yet.
... because different people have different definitions of "green".
Seriously, there is nothing that's "one size fits all", and that goes for places, events, other people, clothing, food, etc.
- Some people actually like the rural/suburb communities, with their cliques, gossip, and all good and bad parts. Some of us are introverts and not interested in neighbourhood gossip/influence/power games at all, and thus may feel actually better in a large town where you're an anonymous nobody in a crowd.
- Some people are perfectly happy in a group/suburb/whatever, where the only choice of conversation is the last football game or the weather. Dunno, maybe they actually like football or don't mind faking it. Some of us prefer other topics. I for one, you know what I like? History. So me, I'd rather look for a place or people where I can talk about that, or failing that, physics, computers or cats.
- Some people are ok with having just one grocery store in their area, with a narrow but cheap selection. (E.g., IIRC here in Germany some 80% of people buy their stuff at Aldi. Which is just that: the cheapest stuff money can buy, but practically zero choice.) On the other hand, my brother had to take along a camera and produce ample evidence that the new town, in which he wanted to move and take a job, had lots and lots of shops of all kinds, to convince his wife to move.
- on one vacation abroad, the hotel also organized some sort of outdoors disco right under my freakin' windows. A lot of people actually seemed to enjoy it, and just went and danced there. Me, I hated it with a passion, and I would have rather just freakin' slept at night.
Etc. Two different people can (and usually do) have very different ideas of what's "green" for them. Person A might hate place/item/person/whatever X and love Y, while person B loves X and hates Y. Go figure.
It's not just ignoring the bad parts. It's that even when you do know the bad parts, different people give them different priorities. What for you is "awful", for someone else may just be "a mild annoyance", and for someone else it might even count as "nice". See the hotel example again: other people's "cool, we can go dance there" ranked up with root canal for me.
Global travel and information just considerally enlarged the pool of choices. Now each can find a different place or person or whatever, which for them _is_ better. Even after taking the bad parts into account.
That's one thing I don't really get: the mentality some people have that the only way to make online friends, or to succeed in a MMO, or whatever, is dependent on pretending to be a horny female teenager.
Somehow it doesn't even add up. The most popular people I've met on MUDs and MMOs for example, were playing male characters, and were the people with a memorable personality one way or another. They might have been the guy who played for ever and knows every single secret lever, or the guy who was the most involved in the community, or the most helpful newbie-helper, or the most (nauseatingly) consistent full-time role-player, or in one case simply the biggest asshole on the MUD. (But always very careful to not break any rules, so the admins never could quite justify outright banning him, even if they were _very_ irritated by him too.) You'd be surprised at the number of fans one can have by simply being the biggest asshole and full-time ganker on the server.
But the opposite works just as well, and in fact much better when you're low level and in no position to be an asshole. You'd be surprised how many people will remember you just because you were nice, helpful, and able to function in a group. Heck, even just being the polite newbie who knows how to ask politely and doesn't try to sound like an "I have 7 level 60 characters, you noob, I just forgot where Stormwind is" clown, you'd be surprised how it does get enough people trying to help. Some of us actually _like_ babysitting a polite newbie. Remember to say "thanks" at the end, and you may well be on the way to making a friend.
If anyone finds it necessary to play the "I'm a cute, lonely 13 year old girl" card to get any "friends" or any online help, then I'd advise them to take a good look critical look at their own personality and approach to human relationships, because that's where the real problem lies.
Then again, staring at this box has taught me one extremely valuable lesson - people will say anything, even if it is meaningless, in order to get a first post (and the inevitable mod points following it).
Heh. You needed the Internet to learn that? No offense, but I'd have thought that anyone who's ever went to (high) school, had any work that doesn't only involve telecommuting, or, really, went out of the house at all, had witnessed the RL-equivalent of karma-whoring. People want to be perceived as part of the group, well liked, cool, fashionable, etc, and will go to insane (and often bloody stupid) extremes to achieve that.
It even has an impact on polls and statistics, as you have to skew your poll to account for the facts that:
- if it seems that the interviewer wants a particular answer, they'll give that answer, just to be liked. So if you actually want a fair result, you have to go to great lengths to make sure that the question sounds as neutral as it the English language allows. (Or, conversely, if you want to skew the statistics to your ends, you just need to give people a strong indication that only a monster would pick the other choices.)
- all else being equal, people tend to answer "yes" more than they answer "no". (Presumably because being too negative is perceived as something bad or non-social.) So you have to actually have randomized tests, where the same question is asked in one way on some forms (e.g., "are you for continuing the war in Iraq?") and as the opposite on others (e.g., "are you for stopping the war in Iraq?")
- as anthropologists showed, even when you accounted for the above two, if you ask people anything about themselves, the result will be basically a lie. Well, not as in a deliberate, conscious-level lie, but more like distorted through the need to perceive themselves as doing the right and, most importantly, the socially-acceptable thing. _Very_ few will give you an answer that, according to the current social standards, would ammount to a "yes, I'm an asshole" confession, even if the poll is completely anonymous and confidential.
Or you can see that at smaller levels, and sometimes even at petty levels, from high school to your everyday work. People ostracize person X, just because they want to fit in a group where the popular ones are against person X. People pretend to be stupid in school, just because in nowadays' broken culture it's _cool_ to be stupid and ignorant, and is waay uncool to show any academic effort or ability. (And god forbid showing _interest_.) Etc.
The most perverse form of that is "groupthink". Take a dozen people which, each of them separately, are against doing X. Put them in a group where they each think that the rest of the group is _for_ X. Watch them all vote/chest-thump/shout-slogans/whatever for X, just to please the rest of the group, and take a decision as a group that neither of them actually really wanted. It's more common than you'd think, and affects a wide range of groups, from small cliques at work to government commissions to whole countries.
Etc, etc, etc.
So let's just say that Slashdot's karma-whoring is actually just representative of society as a whole. In fact, compared to some RL counterparts, let me assure you that the worst/. karma-whores would come out looking as the milder version.
To start with your analogy with WalMart, yes, getting a persona treatment from the greeter still says something. It says that WalMart realizes that they need customers. Not you personally, of course, but that at least as a category you matter.
Even in retail, yes, I'll have to say that I prefer to shop at places where I'm treated nicely. E.g., I get my games at a local EB-Games where the employees are nice, know me, and on the pragmatic side they know by now what I play and they can give me a meaningful recommendation.
Oh, I'm sure that I'm not personally important in their lives, or anything. The fluff does make for a more pleasant shopping experience anyway, and I can afford to spend a measly couple of extra bucks (compared to Amazon) for a litte quality-of-life fluff.
That goes for employers too. I'd rather work for someone who, at least generically, as a _category_, understands at least what my kind of employee is doing and why their bottomline depends on people like me. E.g., understands why the programs we wrote are actually reflected in millions of dollars they save. I'll be more inclined to do a little overtime, or maybe come on a weekend, when I know that someone at least notices the result.
E.g., the guys I work for now have been known to have a party when we finished a program on time (apparently other departments rarely do), or stuff like that. I know that the big boss who decided that isn't going to remember my name personally, but it still is nice to see that he realizes that some good work went in there, and, basically, why is he paying people like me.
By comparison, RS made it very clear what it thinks of its employees value. There are shades and shades of being a cog, and being an unappreciated one isn't particularly motivating.
More importantly, companies and even corporations are made ultimately of _people_. Yes, maybe the corporation as a whole doesn't care about anyone, but people are supposed to. Ultimately it's the _people_ there who motivate or demotivate us, not the faceless company.
Even if I didn't care about the company's feelings, taken as an abstract entity, I might be motivated by the _people_ I interact with. E.g., knowing that my boss is a nice guy and by and large one of us, is motivating in and by itself. Even if I don't think that the company as a whole will care, if I know that that one guy does care, and maybe I'm helping him a little with it, I'll be willing to work a little harder.
By comparison, the boss who acts like he's an impersonal cog in an impersonal machine, won't help anyone's morale and won't make anyone want to help his. If he's just content to keep his own chair warm and not care about anyone, in return noone will care about him or about doing a good job for him.
"Son, I called you here to tell you that, after a long and mature discussion with your mom, we decided that we no longer need you and your sister. With the economic downturn and all, we have to trim the unneeded fat and cut down on the unnecessary expenses. I'm sure that you'll understand the little work that you occasionally do around the house is hardly justifying the expenses of feeding and clothing two children. Maybe we could keep one, but not two.
"So instead of you two, we're outsourcing your job to a chinese kid. As I'm sure you've heard, not only they work cheaper down there, but unlike you American kids, they take school seriously and have skills that you and your sister will likely never have. While you two only ever used school as an excuse to run amok and learn nothing, the chinese kid we found has straight A grades and runs his own gold farming business in his spare time. Whatever gold farming means. That's the kind of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit that, sad to say, is also lacking in America's youth these days. And it's certainly not the kind of spirit that you and your sister ever showed.
"So to cut a long story short, I'm affraid you'll have to pack your things and be out of the house until 5 PM. You will receive your allowance for the next 6 weeks, and I wish you the best of luck in finding yourself another family in that time.
"And, oh, mom and I decided to give ourselves a generous bonus for taking this cost-saving measure, and take a trip to a casin... err... morale-boosting seminar in Las Vegas."
Congrats, you should be a manager, maybe even a board member or CEO, if your view of the world is that sociopathic.
Human interactions are not measured just in how many dollars they make for your (or their) bottom line. Sometimes you can take 5 minutes off your busy schedule just, you know, for the sake of making someone's day less shitty. Just because it's the humane thing to do. Someone has just been fired, and it won't kill you to just say a few soothing words and show (or fake) some compassion. Or just show that someone at least remembers their name, or that they worked there. Put a human/humane face on the whole deal, you know.
Yes, being fired is just normal and just part of how the economy works. It's not the end of the world. Etc. But it's still a stressful event in someone's life. It won't kill you to lower someone's stress a little.
It's also an awakening to the cruel reality that, for all the bullshit "we're all a big family" speeches, you're just a nameless disposable cog in the corporate machine. A cog that's served its purpose, produced all the profit that could be made, and now is disposed of when no longer profitable. All the "we're all a big family" idea not only flies out the window, but it turns out that it's never been true anyway. That's not how families work.
And that's not a cheerful thought. Humans aren't robots, and the millions of years of evolution have sorta hard-wired us to be social beings. Our brains are wired for person-to-person relations, not for a nameless-cog-to-faceless-entity existence. That's too why we build father figures in the sky (i.e., religion), or conspiracy theories with a few people responsible for all this or that, or anthropomorphise our computer/boat/gun/whatever. Because that's the kind of thing we're wired for, and the kind of thing we understand: _people_, not faceless machineries.
And the kind of email oozing an "you're one of the nameless drones we're discarding today" tone, like these people received, only serve to amplify that to the maximum impact possible. It's just twisting the knife in the wound. In the ammo arsenal of unpleasant human interactions, this is the dum-dum.
And if you're willing to advocate that just because the humane alternative is "just a total logistical nightmare"... well, as I was saying, you have some serious upper management potential.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that easy.
The "average life expectancy at birth", yes, is heavily influenced by infant mortality. We know from Roman census data after they took over Egypt that it was really really low indeed even that late. E.g., for women it was 22 years.
But that's only hal the story. We also have a ton of mummies, records, plaques, etc, which make a nice sample. We can divide them by the age when they died and plot that. It looks sort of a gauss curve, plus a major spike right in the first years. You know where the apex of the rest of the curve is? (I.e., without the infant mortality spike) In the 30's for the old kingdom era and in the 40's for the new kingdom. That is for men, btw, so childbirth deaths don't enter the equation either. For women it was lower.
So, yes, even if you didn't die in your infant years, odds were that you wouldn't make it past 40 in the old kingdom or past 50 in the new kingdom. Seriously. If you took a group of people born in the same year, by the time they got to 40 in the old kingdom times, you'd be past the apex of the gauss curve and more than half would have already died.
Yes, like any gauss curve, not everyone died at the same age. Yes, you can find 2 pharaohs who lived over 90 years. But that's the far trailing edge of the curve, _not_ the norm. The average bugger would be dead a _lot_ earlier.
As for what they held for an ideal life expectancy (or "perfect age"), it was mostly because their numerologists considered it a perfect number, and partially what they considered an absolute upper limit. In any case not the norm. It also was 110, not 90. I don't know where you got the "four score and 10" number. But anyway, it was what they thought to be the absolute maximum that someone can possibly live, not something that every Tom, Dick and Harry could take as a norm. As I was saying, we know of a whole 3 in several millenia who actually achieved that, and they were considered even then an outstanding exception and achievement, not something common.
And let me give you another bit of info there: because 110 was a perfect number, the phrase "he diet at age 110" was quite common but did _not_ mean literally that. It actually meant "he lived a perfect life." It meant that guy had helped others and the community and very was well liked. It bore no relationship to the actual age where he died. You could die at 28 and have "he died aged 110" written on your tomb, just because you had been a really helpful guy.
That's one thing that screws up statistics when you don't know what it actually means. It can make it look like "look what kind of a long life many people had back then", when in reality they didn't. Egypt was a crappy place, as life expectancy went. Yes, even without the child mortality. It wasn't Rome.
Heck, even in the 20'th century, with all the medicine and hygiene and all, most people didn't live to the age of 90. So if you're trying to tell me that ancient Egypt had it even better, I'll say, "put down the crack pipe."
As I was saying, the western culture as a whole and USA in particular are at a point where we actually _demand_ that a corporation behaves like a sociopath. We _want_ merciless cost cuts, inhuman sweatshops in other countries, etc, if it makes our shares rise by 50 cents or so.
And we have this illusion that they can be sociopaths only half the time. That they'll act merciless to their competitors or enemies, but somehow retain a sense of loyalty, duty and maybe even grattitude to those of us (voters, shareholders, etc) that got them into that job. Unfortunately that doesn't work that way, and plenty of examples to the contrary exist. Ken Lay had no trouble telling people to buy his shares, while he was selling his, for example. But at any rate, the illusion exists and is very widespread.
So by now you probably see the risk I'm talking about: that if you actually gave prospective CEOs an APD test, it may come to pass that the one with the _higher_ score would get the job.
(Not to say that the rest of the world doesn't have their sociopaths, btw, but the culture tries to at least hide it. Asian countries like Japan for example have a more paternalistic-autocrat kind of business culture for example, so sociopaths have to at least pretend to respect that.)
And if you want to get technical about it, yeah, it's not just sociopaths out there, it's pretty much a split between those and "narcisists". It's not as much of a saving grace as it may seem. Both have exactly zero empathy for their fellow human, both are equally self centered, both are willing to step on your corpse on their way up. Both are incapable of feeling guilt for it. Both don't show much of either paternal or maternal instincts, and certainly not to their employees. So in a way, we're just splitting hairs at this point. It may not be the medical definition, but I tend to see them as basically nuances of being a sociopath.
The technical difference is that the narcisist is mostly focused on his own glory, while the sociopath is mostly in it for the entertainment that comes from having the power and causing distress. E.g., a sociopath might fire half the personnel or make everyone take unpaid vacations when there's actually work to do, just because he enjoys abusing his power. The narcissist might do the same thing because he can get more money or glory out of it. Even if just the glory of seeing his name in the newspaper for doing it. E.g., the sociopath might demand 80 hour weeks because he finds it entertaining to show you he's boss. The narcissist might do it because he smells more profit for him that way, and it's only him that matters, not you. The narcissist may then reduce it to 60 hours if it looks like it'll make him look good in the press, though.
A bigger difference for corporations is that the narcissist is able to plan farther ahead. He's willing to put some long term work and planning into getting a lot of glory and power. The sociopath tends to be focused more on the immediate and short term. Ergo, a lot of them enjoy coming to a company, taking some disastrous decisions, and moving on to the next one. Wall Street loves the sociopaths more because (A) they're more available to be moved in and out for massive axe jobs, and (B) because Wall Street itself has the attention span of a bad ADHD case. It wants action, hype, and big fluctuations _now_.
This, however, is just an ad-hominem based on nothing more than pompous presumptions. You assume too much about what control I have or don't have, or what I need to belive. It's not a matter of comforting thoughts, it's a matter of calling it how I see it. When you read stuff like this (or most of the news about corporate America these days), and the unrepentance that invariably comes with it, it's hard _not_ to recognize sociopathy.
Bingo. I'll have to wholeheartedly aggree with everything you wrote there, even if in retrospect it wasn't that obvious at the time. Still, in my own defense, I did manage to eventually figure out that I needed a break, and went on to play something else.
As I was saying in another post, the fallacy there is assuming that it would be the Jane Average that ends up in those positions of power. Except those who end up at the top, male or female alike, are the kind that aren't representative of the John Does and Jane Averages that make up the rest of the population. But that goes the other way too: comparing Stevens to Clinton doesn't really say anything about comparing men to women in general.
I don't know if men as a whole are better or women as a whole are better (probably neither is better), but comparing the sociopaths at the top won't tell us anything about that. The ones at the top will be the ones who _don't_ actually have the instincts/reflexes/education/etc associated with being either the average man or the average woman. You won't find any maternal or paternal instincts there, just people whose only loyalty is to themselves and care less about everyone else than you'd care about the NPCs in a computer game. You won't find any inherent adherence to either male or female hierarchy/clique/whatever dynamics and mechanisms, either, but at most a determination to mis-use and abuse those to one's own interests. Etc. Anything that you might think of as an inherent trait of either males or females in the average people around you, at that level you won't find people actually displaying either. They may fake it, they may use it to push your buttons, but essentially both are a category of their own that's neither male nor female.
More like it won't make any difference, though not for the obvious extrapolation that everyone will make at that phrase. It's that regardless of which gender you favour, there'll be a certain _kind_ of person who makes it to the top. It's not whether most men are better or most women are better, it's that those who end up at the top will _not_ actually be representative of the majority of men or women anyway.
The world today, at least the western world (though I wouldn't be surprised if other parts too) has a very different minority that's disproportionately represented at the top: the sociopaths. It's not even much of a surprise. In a society and culture where we expect -- and indeed _demand_ -- sociopathic behaviour from corporations and politicians, the ones that make it to the top are those who can promise just that: to behave like a sociopath, and take decisions without letting emotions or empathy get in the way. And there are reasons too, such as their being natural actors and having no loyalty except to themselves. So they can put up an outstanding show for the boss and get a promotion, while you're busy doing actual work.
The thing is, what they do has no resemblance with what Joe Average and Jane Housewife does. Only about 1% of the population scores clean over 30 on an APD (Antisocial Personality Disorder = sociopathy/psychopathy) test. We're talking the creme de la creme, the elite among the elite. (To put it into perspective, the average Joe or Jane have maybe 1 confirmed trait or spurious minor manifestations of 2-3, and even those are often just bad habits or benign when they're not accompanied by others.) They're people who are actually more anti-social (in the medical sense) than the hardened criminals in a prison (who tend to average somewhere in the 20's), yet are smart enough to not end up in prison. You can't really look at what a sociopath does and extrapolate it at what the average man or woman would do, nor viceversa.
They're not only a minority, but they don't even function mentally in the same way as you do. Even if a lot of common people do get caught in an admiration of sociopaths and their methods, in practice they couldn't do the same things. They're just not wired the same way.
I.e., what I'm saying is that you can't look at this case and think she's representative for women as a whole. And conversely, those who think that "having women in power would make for a kinder, gentler world" make the wrong extrapolation in the other direction. They look at some of the average women around them and think, basically, "hey, I bet if she was a CEO/Chairman/President/whatever, it would be a nicer world." Well, maybe it even would, except it won't those who end up in position of power.
Just changing the genre stereotype won't make the world any better, as long as the same kind people are left to run the show. What can change the world is (A) recognizing these people for what they are, and (B) having enough checks and safeguards so they can't run amok and cause major damage.
Which is actually a huge problem. Something as subjective as "who's hot" is probably the most idiotic idea I've ever heard. It's like asking "what's your favourite food" and thinking that everyone certainly likes the exact same dish that you like.
Even people within the same culture have _vastly_ different tastes. That's why all the niche porn sites exist. E.g., as the "Big Beautiful Women" sites prove, there _are_ people who'd pick a 300 pound girl as the hottest. Or as the "Mature" sites prove, some people will pick the 70 year old grandma as uber-hot. Or if you have an otaku solving that captcha he might go for the bland japanese schoolgirl just because she looks japanese, and ignore the gorgeous swedish supermodel in the next photo. Go figure. But that's the kind of variation that human tastes and fetishes present.
Well, I don't think it failed because of the too low price. It was one of those unbelievably stupid ideas that came out of the dot-com era, and you have to wonder what were they smoking when they came up with it.
And it was a PR mess too, when it turned out that it's just a physical spyware product: it called home so they could compile a database of what products were you interested in, for their marketting purposes. I'm sorry, but I find that just as unethical in a physical product as in a program. The way they handled that mess only made it worse, and the security breach where they exposed all the user data didn't help with privacy concerns either. Especially since, again, the only reason that data was there in the first place is that those idiots didn't as much try to offer a valuable service as just run a data collection operation.
Unfortunately this makes it even more stupid. There are many ways to spy on users, and while they're highly unethical, they also cost next to nothing. Spending millions on a physical product and on mailing it, just so you can spy on Joe Average, is pure lunacy.
And in a sense, the CueCat wasn't their product and you weren't their customer. _You_ (or rather your data) were the actual product they were planning to sell to the highest bidder, and the CueCat was just the device to collect that data. The customer, god knows who they had in mind there. As it was the dot-com era, probably some ad provider. And the product, again, was your personal data and shopping habbits. That was the product that flopped, not the CueCat. Was that priced too high or too low? I guess we'll never know, but obviously there weren't many that wanted to pay much for it.
Yes, it could have been turned into something more useful, maybe an optical mouse as you say. I doubt that it would have helped that user data database (their real product) much, though, since if most people just think of it as a mouse and never scan those URLs, they don't contribute much to it.
And it was during the fall of the dot-com era anyway. Advertising money were in free fall for everyone, and VCs were starting to re-discover reality too. I doubt that, even if they could make a working targetted advertising model out of it, they could have possibly gotten enough advertising money to cover their costs.
Then you're not at the level 60 raids if you still _can_ try something new or do an instance with a PUG. See, WoW is a great game at level 1 and goes only gradually downhill from there. But the endgame is a boring repetitive farming exercise. You'll be squeezed in one role. (Try explaining to most guilds that your Priest's role concept at level 60 is damage dealing for a change, then tell me how many laughed their ass off and how many had a tantrum.) You'll spam one icon over and over again in raids. You'll do the same instance 100 times, in the same role, with the same tactics, pulling (or watching someone pull) the same enemies in the same order, spamming the same icon over and over again.
Most other things don't even work, or aren't easy to get to work when you need 40 people to cooperate. Try doing the endgame grind, like in your example, without a main healer and a main tank, and you'll get your ass handed to you in no time.
Or yeah, try doing a tier 2 instance in a PUG. Tell me how it felt to wait for 5 hours until you got the 40'th PUG member, by which time 10 of the first had left because it's midnight already. Then tell me how well it worked when half of them don't actually have the equipment to be anywhere near there, and getting them to work together was like herding cats.
The game basically changes massively at that point. And, sad to say, not for the better. That is why people are bitching about it.
Admittedly, some get really sour about the whole game at that point, as it was basically the bait that got them head-first into that unholy grind. So they'll start hating WoW as a whole, and every single mechanic or quest it ever had. Can't really blame them too much, but it does have the side-effect of making it hard to have a rational and informative discussion about the game. Someone seeing the whole game, from the Deadmines to MC painted with the same brush will get the wrong ideas, often along the lines of "wtf, these people whine about everything indiscriminately. I bet it's no worse than the Deadmines."
As opposed to any other RPG? How many fundamentally different quest _types_ were in Oblivion? Kill X, or find Y, or deliver Z, then report back. That was it.
And don't get me started on other game types. FPS? Kill, kill, kill, find key, kill some more. Action-RPG? See FPS, but in a third person view and with melee weapons. RTS? Build X peons/harvesters/whatever, build a factory, click on build zergling/dwarf/infantry/whatever factory 20 times, rush. The only competition is finding the exact number of those to build for a win, then apply that mindlessly online. Adventure? One single action: click on everything, try to use everything on everything. The only difference being to what ilogical extremes the designers went with those item combinations to slow you down. Etc.
So if the mere repeating the _type_ of action you perform is turning you off, you might as well quit gaming completely. Seriously.
What makes an RPG good, though, are gameply, story, setting, etc. E.g., in Oblivion technically the Fighters' Guild quest with the goblin village is just another "Find. Loot. Kill. Report back." quest, but in practice it was one spooky experience and it gave you a part of the story. E.g., the Dark Brotherhood quests in Oblivion again were, after all, techically "Find. Loot. Kill. Report back." quests all right, but that was one spooky story arc towards the end. If anyone could look at that disembowelled guy hanged upside down and think only "ok, quest delivered", then they just lack the imagination for an RPG. (I'd get into more details, but it's already bordering on major spoilers.)
And so it is with MMOs too. Just lumping action types into categories is like saying "wtf, there are only 2 tree types here" and missing the forest completely, as you're busy categorizing the trees. Admittedly, _most_ MMOs are full of mass-produced crap (EQ2's or SWG's quests come to mind, for example), but WoW actually gives you a piece of story with a logical reason why you're doing that stuff.
Especially at low levels it's actually better in that aspect than a lot of single-player RPGs. See, about half the SP RPGs took Hollywood's whole "hero's journey" recipe literally (beats using their own brains to come up with something new) and stretched it to fill anywhere between 10 and 100 hours with it. But that means that the "looky, he's an everyman just like you" part that might have took 10 minutes in an action movie, becomes hours of doing mundane non-interesting crap that has nothing to do with the story later. Not so in WoW. Sure, the newbie quest arcs aren't world-saving class, but they're at least logical, make sense on their own, and do make you feel like being a part of something and doing something useful. And they tell you a bit of the world's story too.
The ultimate purpose of PR or marketting is to sell a product. That's it. That's why we pay those people.
In the over-production economy of today it's damn easy to produce lots of anything, but it's hard to sell it. Insert your favourite product and major corporation manufacturing it, and it would be trivial for them to ramp their production to the point where it exceeds world demand. Nike or Adidas could swamp the world in sports shoes, Samsung could bury the world in TVs, and Coca Cola could easily ramp its production to the point where the whole human species could drink only that. That's not the problem. The problem is selling that stuff.
_That_ is the problem that marketting and PR were supposed to solve. Plain and simple. That's why their clients pay for their services.
A marketting or PR campaign whose backlash actually hurts product sales (e.g., Daikatana and the massive backlash to the "John Romero will make you his bitch" campaign), is plain and simple a flop. I don't know how you want to redefine PR's job, but from the client's point of view, he didn't get _his_ problem solved: selling more products. That's the real problem he had and needed solved. Anything else is just missing the point and solving the wrong problem.
Just exposure is damn easy to get. You only need to fund a spam campaign or something equally stupid, and you'll get all the negative exposure you can possibly hope for. Or get your products to fail in some spectacular way. (Incendiary laptops with Sony batteries, anyone?) That'll get you in everyone's head. But that's not the exposure anyone actually wants.
The trick is getting the kind of exposure that makes people actually want to buy the product. You need to get people to associate product with being cool, trendy, hip, or just having some benefit out of it. Stuff that makes them want to buy product X instead of product Y. (E.g., make them want Coca Cola instead of Pepsi or water from the tap.) That's really what the client pays for, and that's why he pays trained experts instead of just doing some hare-brained publicity stunt himself.
Isolating half of the issue as "only that's my job, and it doesn't involve whether or not it helps you" is missing the point. Saying "my job is to create market awareness, it's not my job whether it also helps your business or kill it" is as stupid as hearing a surgeon say, "well, my job is only to cut you open, not to actually remove your appendix and/or make sure you survive."
I.e., Hanlon's Razor fully applies: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
So, yeah, rest assured that most of us don't think that Symantec or MacAffee have malicious intent there. Most of us are fully aware that they're just incompetent, and hire the cheapest incompetents
Well, see, that IRL is actually the whole issue and measure of a product's worth: whether you'd pay the price for it, or not.
Because if we're talking as in "well, if it was free of charge, I'd get one", then you've covered pretty much everything in that category. I know wouldn't refuse a lot of things, if they were free, even if they're bloody stupid and/or I have no intention of using them more than once or twice. But if they cost 0$, hey, I can just chuck it in the garbage bin later and I've lost nothing, right?
The problem is that IRL most things aren't free, and bang/buck is actually a very important criterion. There's a moment when you look at a toy and at it's price tag, and decide, "gee, it would be bloody _stupid_ to pay _that_ much for that." And many a product ends up a dud not because it's a stupid product per se, but because it's just not worth the price tag it comes with.
And that's where the Segway failed. You're not the only one who wouldn't mind one for free. I wouldn't either. I don't think much of it as a means of transportation, but, hey, it might make a good high-tech toy to play once or twice with. But when you slap a $5000 price tag on that toy, it start's looking like a stupid toy for people with more money than brains. I could even afford that price very easily, but looking at it from a bang-per-buck perspective, it's entirely too little bang for that kind of buck. I can easily think a _lot_ of other stuff to blow my money on, that would be more useful, fun, or whatever.
Don't underestimate how disconnected from reality or logic conspiracy theorists can be. There _are_ people who believe that PC viruses are written by antivirus companies, human/animal diseases are created in the lab by big pharma corporations, fires are started by the firemen, etc. It's the "follow the money" kind of conspiracy theory. And don't get me wrong, "follow the money" is generally good advice, but some people are too stupid or too schizophrenic to actually successfully follw the money... or any coherent train of thought, for that matter. So they arrive at such stupidities instead.
No, especially if you _do_ follow the money, that's a dumb analogy. Yes, please do follow the money:
- Sony's music division makes money by, you know, selling CDs. The Sony "rootkit" was a piece of copy-protection software which was supposed to help sell more CDs. It wasn't just some piece of wanton malware, and indeed the malware uses were simply because it was designed and programmed by the cheapest incompetent monekys. But at any rate, its purpose was to make more money for Sony.
- This codec is just a wanton piece of malware, that doesn't seem to serve any particular purpose other than disabling a PC's protection. It doesn't even install its own malicious payload, it just opens the PC up for whoever gets there next. It doesn't copy-protect DVDs, it doesn't even track copyright infringers, it doesn't do _anything_ which would make more money for the MPAA. It's just a piece of wanton malware.
I.e., if you do follow the money, Sony's rootkit had a financial reason behind it, while linking this codec to MPAA _doesn't_ produce or promise any obvious benefit for the MPAA. I.e., yes, I'll side with the grand-parent post. Whoever was the stupid fanboy that submitted that inflamatory summary, _is_ a retard and doesn't present any obvious link between that and the MPAA. It's just an inflamatory statement pulled out of the ass, with not even conjecture to back it up.
Now I know it's Slashdot and "MPAA is evil" bitching and moaning is the norm and good for karma. But even then I do prefer the kind which can actually put a coherent rationale behind that bitching. You know, something based on facts and logic, and where the extrapolations have at least a hint of plausibility. And this summary just doesn't make that grade. It's just something pulled out of the ass, and badly at that.
Let me tell you all (again) why the USSR communism and some other totalitarian regimes worked.
Yes, it involved the secret police, but it didn't always mean Stalin's executing and deporting millions. Eventually it evolved into something more subtle: making people affraid that the Big Brother knows what they're up to, and God knows when it will come back to bite them in the ass.
The idea was that somewhere there's a dossier about you, containing stuff you've said, stuff you've done, people you've associated with, and, to stay on topic, if you've been reported as reading subversive literature or listening to capitalist radio broadcasts. The Big Brother would have _loved_ to know if you're reading The Road To Serfdom instead of the filtered news in Pravda, or if you're listening to BBC instead of the government propaganda stations. And then one day it could have consequences ranging from outright landing in jail, to more subtle stuff like never getting a promotion because you're an untrustworthy, subversive element. Or associated with one such person.
Now bear in mind that the USSR version was the low tech version, involving literally paper pages in a cardboard binder, and sketchy reports by a limited number of informants and agents provocateurs. That was still enough to create a nation-wide chilling effect, and keep people doing nothing rather than face the consequences. Even minor things which probably wouldn't have actually warranted any repressive action, people rather just didn't do them. Once you get the paranoia and, literally, the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, people start trying to not go on record as having done anything that could possibly look bad.
It's not even a case of "it works just as well, and cheaper", it actually works _better_ than Stalin's brutal massacres and creates less martyrs. If people don't know when or how you'll use that, they'll watch themselves all the better. They'll even create their own imaginary proof where no actual oppression existed. E.g., maybe the last round of being rejected for a better paid job or for a trip abroad had something to do with that drunken chat to comrade Piotr, where you expressed dissatisfaction with the government? You don't know. Better not do it again, just in case.
How does that apply here? Well, easy. The more I read about such data collection, the more it starts to sound like a high-tech version of it. It's getting to the point where someone there knows who you've talked to on the phone, what things you searched online, what TV/radio programmes you've watched/listened to. And it has the potential to create a massive chilling effect.
And before someone jumps in with "we're America, we'd never let something like that happen", well, it's already happening. Even without government intervention, the thought that the next boss might google them, makes a lot of people go to insane lengths to either stay anonymous, or to say only bland non-offensive things that hopefully can't come back to bite them in the ass at the next job interview.
Now imagine that there's no way to stay anonymous there. There's a mountain of data that points at _your_ house. The phone calls you've made, the phone calls you've received, the news stations you listen to, the strings you've searched for, etc.
That's insightful indeed, but if you _are_ interested in 3D gaming, then (A) your main gaming rig will be too loud, and (B) just getting a DVD player might still be cheaper than building a silent second computer.
- The OS alone for that second computer might set you back more than the cost of a cheap DVD player.
- Add a graphics card, even a low end X300 at that, and some RAM, and by now you're a little over that $200 mark they quote for a good DVD player.
- Add a CPU. And if you want really silent there, you're probably going to end up with a Dothan or Core, and they cost a fair bit. (Yes, you can silence an Athlon too, but that involves a copper heatsink, a high end Papst or Panaflo fan, and some rubber pins and mats, so there go even more money.) You'll need a motherboard for it too, at that, and the Dothan ones are anything but cheap.
- Now you're up to the PSU and case, and let's be frank: your average "silent" PSU is actually really noisy. The ones which really are silent, e.g., the Antec Phantom, also cost a bit more than the average. And if you went with the Phantom and a fanless graphics card, you probably don't want to stuff them in your average no-name case either, since then the case's fans will bring you back to square one. No, you'll want a good mesh case, so natural convection does most of the work.
Alternately you could go with a Zallman TNN (Totally No Noise) case which acts as a heatsink itself. Those are as quiet as it possibly can get. Unfortunately they also cost several hundreds of dollars even for the smallest and cheapest model.
- Hard drives aren't that expensive nowadays, but if you go for a good silent Samsung and some rubber mounts, it's going to be a bit more expensive than just chucking in your old 60 GB drive from the ball bearing era and sounding like a high powered drill. For _really_ silent you might even have to go with a Flash drive or RAM drive, at which point it costs a mint.
- And of course, you need the DVD drive itself. Again, they're anything but expensive these days, but it still needs to be bought.
- You'll also want a good graphics card, since, honestly, it's a media centre, not a white noise and squeak machine. While a cheap ATI card or even onboard graphics may be perfect for DVDs, but if you'll pardon the obscenity, your average onboard sound system sucks hairy ass. The signal to noise ratio of most mainboards is a sick joke, and a lot tend to squeak or click each time anything happens on the bus. Lack of shielding tends to do that. It just won't do as a high-end DVD player substitute. So you're going to end up with an Audigy 2 or insert your favourite other high-end card.
Well, you get the idea by now. By the time you put together all that, with care that you keep your noise down, you could have bought 2-3 DVD players for the same money.
I'm the "proud" owner of an X1900XTX and let me just say they're very very very loud.
It's hard to explain what's stupidly wrong with the design without needing drawings, so bear with me. Let's just say that as the turbine sucks air from one side (as opposed to above and below) and blows it out the other, this necessarily creates a narrowed bottleneck in the airflow. The air can only enter a centrifugal turbine from above or below, so that incoming airflow has to be narrowed into a duct going under the turbine. This however creates more noise (as the air moves faster through that narrowed space) and needs the turbine to spin faster (to make up for the extra drag factor of that narrow duct).
Seriously, I just have to wonder (A) if that stupidity was designed by some graphics artist or marketroid instead of an engineer, (B) WTF were they smoking at the time? Must have been some really good stuff. And (C) where can I buy some of that stuff? And don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a good graphics artist or marketting expert when they work in their own field, but engineering is best left to real engineers.
You can somewhat silence it by replacing the stock cooler with a Zalman or Arctic Cooling cooler, but don't expect miracles. It's a very very hot chip, so even a well engineered fan and heatsink still need to move a lot of air to keep it cool. It will just move it down a notch from "jet engine take-off" levels to merely "loud fan" levels.
I've managed to reduce it even more by also involving a good case (lots of airflow without needing insane number of fans) and some generous soundproofing of that case, but still... it's at best described as "low noise", not "silent". It's ok to play games with the headphones on, but it's not quite what I'd want in a movie player.
And here's why not: movies have a wide range of volumes, ranging from muffled footsteps and whispered conversations to shrieks and explosions. Even if you got your PC to be only 30 dB or so, that's the noise level with which the low volume parts of the movie will have to compete. If a whispered conversation there is, say, only 40 dB or so, on top of your computer's noise it will be at a lousy 10 dB signal-to-noise ratio. It's already in the domain where you may have to rewind to listen again, because it's hard to understand what they're saying.
Well, that's just the thing. The kind of fucktards who _need_ to pretend they're a horny teenage female to cover for their social ineptitude, are too socially inept to function in RL society too. The kind of idiot who can't ask anything nicely in a MMO, I just can't see him/her being the polite and considerate kind IRL either. The kind who just has to come out as knowing everything better than you do, again, you can see the same specimens IRL every day. And the kind who's an ivory-tower "everyone except me is an idiot" kind of loser, trust me, they're not like that only online. You can find them IRL too building convoluted theories about why everyone else avoids their nasty presence.
And ironically enough, this sad kind of loser is the first who'll throw around stuff like "Do yourself a favor and get a life. A real life, with real friends. Not "online friends"." It's exactly this kind of loser who thinks that throwing around enough insults can mask their own inadequacies. Ironic, because if they were capable of functioning in society IRL, they wouldn't find themselves ostracized online either.
So, yes, by all means, take your own advice: "Do yourself a favor and get a life. A real life, with real friends. Not "online friends"." Aptly put, really. Do that. Then you might get just enough social skill to be accepted in a group, online or offline, without having to pretend you're a horny female teen.
Then you might actually be able to have _friends_, online or offline, as you may choose. Not just horny men willing to overlook your obvious social ineptitude and crap personality, but real friends. There's a massive difference between the two. But I don't expect that you've found it yet.
... because different people have different definitions of "green".
Seriously, there is nothing that's "one size fits all", and that goes for places, events, other people, clothing, food, etc.
- Some people actually like the rural/suburb communities, with their cliques, gossip, and all good and bad parts. Some of us are introverts and not interested in neighbourhood gossip/influence/power games at all, and thus may feel actually better in a large town where you're an anonymous nobody in a crowd.
- Some people are perfectly happy in a group/suburb/whatever, where the only choice of conversation is the last football game or the weather. Dunno, maybe they actually like football or don't mind faking it. Some of us prefer other topics. I for one, you know what I like? History. So me, I'd rather look for a place or people where I can talk about that, or failing that, physics, computers or cats.
- Some people are ok with having just one grocery store in their area, with a narrow but cheap selection. (E.g., IIRC here in Germany some 80% of people buy their stuff at Aldi. Which is just that: the cheapest stuff money can buy, but practically zero choice.) On the other hand, my brother had to take along a camera and produce ample evidence that the new town, in which he wanted to move and take a job, had lots and lots of shops of all kinds, to convince his wife to move.
- on one vacation abroad, the hotel also organized some sort of outdoors disco right under my freakin' windows. A lot of people actually seemed to enjoy it, and just went and danced there. Me, I hated it with a passion, and I would have rather just freakin' slept at night.
Etc. Two different people can (and usually do) have very different ideas of what's "green" for them. Person A might hate place/item/person/whatever X and love Y, while person B loves X and hates Y. Go figure.
It's not just ignoring the bad parts. It's that even when you do know the bad parts, different people give them different priorities. What for you is "awful", for someone else may just be "a mild annoyance", and for someone else it might even count as "nice". See the hotel example again: other people's "cool, we can go dance there" ranked up with root canal for me.
Global travel and information just considerally enlarged the pool of choices. Now each can find a different place or person or whatever, which for them _is_ better. Even after taking the bad parts into account.
That's one thing I don't really get: the mentality some people have that the only way to make online friends, or to succeed in a MMO, or whatever, is dependent on pretending to be a horny female teenager.
Somehow it doesn't even add up. The most popular people I've met on MUDs and MMOs for example, were playing male characters, and were the people with a memorable personality one way or another. They might have been the guy who played for ever and knows every single secret lever, or the guy who was the most involved in the community, or the most helpful newbie-helper, or the most (nauseatingly) consistent full-time role-player, or in one case simply the biggest asshole on the MUD. (But always very careful to not break any rules, so the admins never could quite justify outright banning him, even if they were _very_ irritated by him too.) You'd be surprised at the number of fans one can have by simply being the biggest asshole and full-time ganker on the server.
But the opposite works just as well, and in fact much better when you're low level and in no position to be an asshole. You'd be surprised how many people will remember you just because you were nice, helpful, and able to function in a group. Heck, even just being the polite newbie who knows how to ask politely and doesn't try to sound like an "I have 7 level 60 characters, you noob, I just forgot where Stormwind is" clown, you'd be surprised how it does get enough people trying to help. Some of us actually _like_ babysitting a polite newbie. Remember to say "thanks" at the end, and you may well be on the way to making a friend.
If anyone finds it necessary to play the "I'm a cute, lonely 13 year old girl" card to get any "friends" or any online help, then I'd advise them to take a good look critical look at their own personality and approach to human relationships, because that's where the real problem lies.
Heh. You needed the Internet to learn that? No offense, but I'd have thought that anyone who's ever went to (high) school, had any work that doesn't only involve telecommuting, or, really, went out of the house at all, had witnessed the RL-equivalent of karma-whoring. People want to be perceived as part of the group, well liked, cool, fashionable, etc, and will go to insane (and often bloody stupid) extremes to achieve that.
It even has an impact on polls and statistics, as you have to skew your poll to account for the facts that:
- if it seems that the interviewer wants a particular answer, they'll give that answer, just to be liked. So if you actually want a fair result, you have to go to great lengths to make sure that the question sounds as neutral as it the English language allows. (Or, conversely, if you want to skew the statistics to your ends, you just need to give people a strong indication that only a monster would pick the other choices.)
- all else being equal, people tend to answer "yes" more than they answer "no". (Presumably because being too negative is perceived as something bad or non-social.) So you have to actually have randomized tests, where the same question is asked in one way on some forms (e.g., "are you for continuing the war in Iraq?") and as the opposite on others (e.g., "are you for stopping the war in Iraq?")
- as anthropologists showed, even when you accounted for the above two, if you ask people anything about themselves, the result will be basically a lie. Well, not as in a deliberate, conscious-level lie, but more like distorted through the need to perceive themselves as doing the right and, most importantly, the socially-acceptable thing. _Very_ few will give you an answer that, according to the current social standards, would ammount to a "yes, I'm an asshole" confession, even if the poll is completely anonymous and confidential.
Or you can see that at smaller levels, and sometimes even at petty levels, from high school to your everyday work. People ostracize person X, just because they want to fit in a group where the popular ones are against person X. People pretend to be stupid in school, just because in nowadays' broken culture it's _cool_ to be stupid and ignorant, and is waay uncool to show any academic effort or ability. (And god forbid showing _interest_.) Etc.
The most perverse form of that is "groupthink". Take a dozen people which, each of them separately, are against doing X. Put them in a group where they each think that the rest of the group is _for_ X. Watch them all vote/chest-thump/shout-slogans/whatever for X, just to please the rest of the group, and take a decision as a group that neither of them actually really wanted. It's more common than you'd think, and affects a wide range of groups, from small cliques at work to government commissions to whole countries.
Etc, etc, etc.
So let's just say that Slashdot's karma-whoring is actually just representative of society as a whole. In fact, compared to some RL counterparts, let me assure you that the worst
To start with your analogy with WalMart, yes, getting a persona treatment from the greeter still says something. It says that WalMart realizes that they need customers. Not you personally, of course, but that at least as a category you matter.
Even in retail, yes, I'll have to say that I prefer to shop at places where I'm treated nicely. E.g., I get my games at a local EB-Games where the employees are nice, know me, and on the pragmatic side they know by now what I play and they can give me a meaningful recommendation.
Oh, I'm sure that I'm not personally important in their lives, or anything. The fluff does make for a more pleasant shopping experience anyway, and I can afford to spend a measly couple of extra bucks (compared to Amazon) for a litte quality-of-life fluff.
That goes for employers too. I'd rather work for someone who, at least generically, as a _category_, understands at least what my kind of employee is doing and why their bottomline depends on people like me. E.g., understands why the programs we wrote are actually reflected in millions of dollars they save. I'll be more inclined to do a little overtime, or maybe come on a weekend, when I know that someone at least notices the result.
E.g., the guys I work for now have been known to have a party when we finished a program on time (apparently other departments rarely do), or stuff like that. I know that the big boss who decided that isn't going to remember my name personally, but it still is nice to see that he realizes that some good work went in there, and, basically, why is he paying people like me.
By comparison, RS made it very clear what it thinks of its employees value. There are shades and shades of being a cog, and being an unappreciated one isn't particularly motivating.
More importantly, companies and even corporations are made ultimately of _people_. Yes, maybe the corporation as a whole doesn't care about anyone, but people are supposed to. Ultimately it's the _people_ there who motivate or demotivate us, not the faceless company.
Even if I didn't care about the company's feelings, taken as an abstract entity, I might be motivated by the _people_ I interact with. E.g., knowing that my boss is a nice guy and by and large one of us, is motivating in and by itself. Even if I don't think that the company as a whole will care, if I know that that one guy does care, and maybe I'm helping him a little with it, I'll be willing to work a little harder.
By comparison, the boss who acts like he's an impersonal cog in an impersonal machine, won't help anyone's morale and won't make anyone want to help his. If he's just content to keep his own chair warm and not care about anyone, in return noone will care about him or about doing a good job for him.
Heh... I can just see it now.
"Son, I called you here to tell you that, after a long and mature discussion with your mom, we decided that we no longer need you and your sister. With the economic downturn and all, we have to trim the unneeded fat and cut down on the unnecessary expenses. I'm sure that you'll understand the little work that you occasionally do around the house is hardly justifying the expenses of feeding and clothing two children. Maybe we could keep one, but not two.
"So instead of you two, we're outsourcing your job to a chinese kid. As I'm sure you've heard, not only they work cheaper down there, but unlike you American kids, they take school seriously and have skills that you and your sister will likely never have. While you two only ever used school as an excuse to run amok and learn nothing, the chinese kid we found has straight A grades and runs his own gold farming business in his spare time. Whatever gold farming means. That's the kind of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit that, sad to say, is also lacking in America's youth these days. And it's certainly not the kind of spirit that you and your sister ever showed.
"So to cut a long story short, I'm affraid you'll have to pack your things and be out of the house until 5 PM. You will receive your allowance for the next 6 weeks, and I wish you the best of luck in finding yourself another family in that time.
"And, oh, mom and I decided to give ourselves a generous bonus for taking this cost-saving measure, and take a trip to a casin... err... morale-boosting seminar in Las Vegas."
Congrats, you should be a manager, maybe even a board member or CEO, if your view of the world is that sociopathic.
Human interactions are not measured just in how many dollars they make for your (or their) bottom line. Sometimes you can take 5 minutes off your busy schedule just, you know, for the sake of making someone's day less shitty. Just because it's the humane thing to do. Someone has just been fired, and it won't kill you to just say a few soothing words and show (or fake) some compassion. Or just show that someone at least remembers their name, or that they worked there. Put a human/humane face on the whole deal, you know.
Yes, being fired is just normal and just part of how the economy works. It's not the end of the world. Etc. But it's still a stressful event in someone's life. It won't kill you to lower someone's stress a little.
It's also an awakening to the cruel reality that, for all the bullshit "we're all a big family" speeches, you're just a nameless disposable cog in the corporate machine. A cog that's served its purpose, produced all the profit that could be made, and now is disposed of when no longer profitable. All the "we're all a big family" idea not only flies out the window, but it turns out that it's never been true anyway. That's not how families work.
And that's not a cheerful thought. Humans aren't robots, and the millions of years of evolution have sorta hard-wired us to be social beings. Our brains are wired for person-to-person relations, not for a nameless-cog-to-faceless-entity existence. That's too why we build father figures in the sky (i.e., religion), or conspiracy theories with a few people responsible for all this or that, or anthropomorphise our computer/boat/gun/whatever. Because that's the kind of thing we're wired for, and the kind of thing we understand: _people_, not faceless machineries.
And the kind of email oozing an "you're one of the nameless drones we're discarding today" tone, like these people received, only serve to amplify that to the maximum impact possible. It's just twisting the knife in the wound. In the ammo arsenal of unpleasant human interactions, this is the dum-dum.
And if you're willing to advocate that just because the humane alternative is "just a total logistical nightmare"... well, as I was saying, you have some serious upper management potential.