Several applications in the background do _not_ count, because those can and do get different data and code segments. You _can_ support that without going 64 bit, and Intel's Xeon addressing did so for years already.
So does Photoshop allocate a single array of more than 4 GB? I seriously doubt that.
At 4 bytes per pixel (32 bit colour) you'd need more than 1 _billion_ pixels in a photo. I.e., you'd need to work on a picture larger than 32768 pixel tall and and 32768 wide.
Even if you print it in 300 dpi (most posters are printed in a much more coarse resolution) and wanted each dot to be its individual pixel, we're talking a roughly 110x110 inch area. I.e., a 9x9 ft poster. (About 3m by 3m in metric.)
That's already billboard sized, and those are definitely printed in an order of magnitude lower DPI.
I don't know, I just don't see many home users actually working on 32k by 32k pictures, or not every day. Heck, I doubt that any professional artist does that daily.
Well, to put it otherwise, I'm not concerned with _good_ parents. Those will be good parents even with a V chip or whatever. Who knows, maybe they'll even get some good use out of it.
So if you're a good parent, hey, you have my respect. God knows you don't have an easy job there. And in that case, I don't believe the chip will turn you into a bad parent anyway. So in that case, you're not among those I'm concerned about.
I'm really just concerned with the "jerks" (in your words) you describe. Those _will_ use any available excuse to avoid their kids.
And, well, that's all I'm saying (and as far as I can tell, what everyone bashing the chip in this thread is saying): for _those_, the V chip just promises to be another excuse.
Now you do bring a valid point that the extreme cases avoid their kids well enough already. That's a very insightful observation.
But I'm more concerned with the dark-grey case who haven't as much completely given up, but rather given up on even trying to do it _well_. The kind that's just doing the absolute minimum that allows them to say with a straight face that they've done their duty, or at least tried. In some cases it doesn't even take much for that straight case.
Such a chip has the potential to allow those to spend even less time with the kid. Whereas previously they might have _occasionally_ felt an urge to see wth the kid is playing, and maybe put up a token fuss about it, now they can just install a chip and never think about it again.
You know, for all the bullshit about how Linux is ahead of MS in the 64 bit department, that's _not_ my experience with it.
Sometime during th last half of last year, i.e., after more than a year of "Linux is 64 bit already" bullshit, I actually gave it a try. Gentoo, to be precise. Let me tell you how it worked:
There were almost no drivers for anything. Not for the hard drive, not for AGP, not for anything. And that was on a Via K8T800 chipset, i.e., the chipset the A64 was launched with.
Which is just as well, because ATI also had no 64 bit drivers for my 9800 XT. I ended up staring into a 60 Hz VESA Framebuffer display for about a week before I uninstalled it.
And you know how slow that framebuffer was? Let's just say it's the first time I saw DSL downloads being braked by the speed of updating the progress bar.
But maybe it had 64 bit applications? Nope, guess again. No 64 bit OpenOffice, no 64 bit Eclipse, not one goddamn app I needed to use was ported yet. Just for a lark I tried emerging Pingus. (God knows the framebuffer speed didn't promise to be good for a game.) Guess what? That one wasn't 64 bit ready, either.
So you folks are telling me... what? That a freakin' useless system with no apps and no drivers counts as being ahead of MS? Yeah, right. That MS sucks for not loading 32 bit drivers... just like Linux didn't load ATI's 32 bit drivers? That MS's marketting is more guilty than the bleating zealots promoting a Linux system without drivers or apps as a finished and production-ready solution?
Sometimes this kind of zealotry strikes me like doing more harm than good. I can tell you that _I_ am not looking forward to trying 64 bit Linux again. (And I'm writing this in Konqueror in 32 bit mode Gentoo linux right now, so you can spare the "Redmond fanboy" wisecracks.) I think other people who got tricked by that zealotry would be even less inclined to give it another try, ever.
It may not be obvious, but _some_ truth in advertising can go a long way. Yes, we're all nerds, we're all outraged as the "creative puffering" that marketting does. But one-upping them via outright lies and outright promoting an unfinished product where only the kernel and GCC is anywhere near 64 bit ready, well, is just a way to shoot the whole Linux community in the foot.
It may not be obvious, but the _only_ use and reason to live of a computer or an OS is to run an apps, and of those is to solve a problem the user has. Same as a tool. You don't buy a microwave oven as an ideological statement against gas ovens, you buy them to actually heat some stuff in them. Same with computers.
And there a tool which sorta is imperfect beats a tool which is completely useless any day.
That's the problem with the mindless zealotry: you sold someone a solution based on _your_ ideology, rather than his needs, you've lost him as a customer for good. That tool from MS is very very imperfect, yes, but it does run Paintshop, some games, etc. It does what Joe Average wants. If your big ideology win is selling Joe a tool which doesn't do that, you haven't converted him, you've just gained someone who'll tell all his friends to stay off that Linux crap.
The thing that sucked about 16 bit addressing was if you needed more than 64k in _one_ _block_. It wasn't the total RAM (any computer had more than 64k for years), it was the addressing inside one block larger than 64k that was the problem.
E.g., take as little as a 640x480 bitmap in 16 colours (4 bit). We're talking some 150k. Now try 16 bit colour: 600k. Even addressing a pixel in that involved segment maths.
_That_ was why 32 bit had a very clear advantages.
Is 64 bit that necessary nowadays? I doubt it. Is there any desktop program out there which actually allocates more than 4 gigabytes in a single block?
The point isn't that the software as such is good or bad. The point is that relying on panacea and magic talismans can actually be _worse_. You know why? Because relying on some miracle snake oil can make one actually do less of the effective things.
Before you know it, half the parents will spend even less time with their kids, because hey now we have a bullshit chip to supervise the kid.
Childhood is an age when we're hard-coded to learn. We want to know why the sky is blue, why Jerry hits Tom upside the head with a frying pan, and occasionally why the nice lady in the porn mag that Timmy stole from his parents is taking it up the ass.
And as a parent your (admittedly uncomfortable) job is to provide those answers. Because otherwise someone else will. The questions don't disappear because you pretend something doesn't exist: it just makes the kid get the answers from someone else.
Hoping that your kid never even learns that violence or sex even exist is _not_ the solution. And I don't mean just "not the effective solution", but simply "not a solution."
Raising someone to be a good moral person is a very noble goal indeed. But the way is to talk to them. To explain the _what_ and the _why_ part of that morals system. To be there for them when they actually have a question.
Because if they don't learn that from you, you learn that from someone else. And learn it wrong.
If you aren't there to explain to them _why_ beating someone up is wrong, they _will_ learn from school that being a violent bully is way cool. And blocking Mortal Kombat won't do a damn thing to prevent that.
So basically that is the whole problem: not that such a chip is bad as such. The problem is that it allows even more parents to avoid talking to their kid. Which just means more kids will end up learning their morals off the street, instead of from their parents.
Well, just wanted to say I think you're right, but IMHO we need to see the bigger picture than just "human speech == intelligence."
Honestly, most species have evolved some kinds of intelligence, far beyond what many humans credit them with. IMHO the parrots are a more interesting case because they can actually articulate human words, but I wouldn't discount the intelligence of animals who lack a suitable larynx for that. Everything you describe, except for actually articulating words, can be observed in at least half the mammal species I can think of.
In some cases it's not even just learning by imitation.
E.g., cats not only can learn, but are actively taught by their mother. If you've ever had a cat with kittens, you've probably noticed how she talks to them for hours. (And likely got annoyed when she does it at 4 AM.)
And if you take a kitten from his/her mom very early, he/she'll grow up to be a bit of a retarded cat. So all that meowing at night wasn't just socializing.
This isn't necessarily to say "cats are smart", but rather that most species evolved towards some kind of "smart". Natural selection favours adaptability, and adapting by learning is the most efficient kind.
Sharing information with other members of the species, i.e. _some_ form of speech (even if it means meowing, barking or chirping) was also a very immediate survival advantage. E.g., for most species of animals it's a very real advantage to be able to tell your cubs "hide!" or "come here, I brought you dinner" and the like.
In the cats' case, it's obviously a language that can transmit behaviour information to the kitten. Probably not as complex or as capable of abstraction as human language, but complex enough to tell that kitten how to act in certain circumstances, or what its priorities should be. (E.g., "wash yourself often". Cats taken very early from their mother do it less often than ones who got taught.) I.e., it might be more complex than a parrot's learning to say "hi" and "goodbye".
So basically, yeah, I'd guess that life anywhere, in any conditions, would probably tend to evolve towards some kind of intelligence and communication capabilities.
You know, I have one particularly retarded alarm going off every fucking day where I live. Sometimes at night. If that's a bird, I swear I'm getting a shotgun:P
The whole "waah, but they suck me dry with tickets" complaint starts from the false premise that the mean police/government/whatever just taxes you, and there's nothing you can possibly do to avoid that. Well, false: you can stop speeding already, and you'll get no more tickets. It's that simple.
Frankly, I don't think endangering others is some sacred right. Cars can and do kill or cripple. More people die or end up crippled in a year, _any_ year, than in all aircraft-related accidents combined, _including_ the 9/11. That's why all those laws are there in the first place.
And the real issue isn't even getting home faster, which usually isn't even the achieved result. The issue is: thanks to the ads of the car industry some decades ago, the artifficial image was created that powerful cars are some supremely manly thing. That driving anything less than a 200 HP gas-guzzler, and/or god forbid actually driving it carefully or at the speed limit, is akin to wearing an "I have a small dick" banner.
And if they only endangered themselves, I wouldn't even have anything against it. I always said that more people should be encouraged to nominate themselves for the Darwin Awards.But unfortunately these people don't only endanger themselves, they also endanger everyone else on the road.
And I'll be damned if I see anything wrong with sucking them dry. Stuff them with tickets until they finally get it in their head that yes, they too are supposed to obey the speed limit. I'll drink to that.
Or here's a better idea that doesn't even involve turning it into a revenue source: death penalty. No, I'm not kidding. If you get involved in _any_ accident, including "but he just appeared in front of me", and you were over the speed limit, you get to swing by the neck to death. No ifs, no buts, no atenuating circumstances.
Because that's just the kind of thing that the speed limit is there to prevent. The issue isn't what you can do with the car in ideal conditions. The issue is when someone backed out of a parking lot in front of you, or some kid jumped in front of your headlights, or the car in front has to brake, or whatever. _Then_ it starts to matter that braking distance increases with the square of the speed.
Insurance rates are already based on extensive statistics of accidents and costs. The insurance company wants the income to equal the expenses plus X% profit margin. (Where X can't be sky-high because there still is some competition there.)
And that's where the statistics come in.
E.g., cars that look sportsy will have a higher accident rate than something that looks like a Peugeot 106 or VW Lupo or Ford Fiesta. Because every college kid trying to impress college girls (and some mid-life crisis men for the same reason) will buy one of those and drive like a fucktard.
Unfortunately, this also illustrates another problem: like any statistics that don't include _your_ driving style, you're penalized for stuff outside your control.
So basically there are classes of cars where you're penalized not for the car's being itself unsafe or actually a race car (hence needing better reflexes at its top speed) or anything, but because it looks cool enough to be bought by retards.
So personally I see nothing wrong with taking individual skill into account. If I bought a cool looking car and drive it only in town and only at or below the speed limit, I wouldn't mind paying less insurance than the fucktards with an added wing and 4" exhaust (even seen one on a 1.1 litre engine car) and try to look cool by driving like a public menace.
Of course, you are right, that does mean that the ones who aren't in the safe driving group will pay more, because they _are_ in a group that produces more accidents. And as I've said, the insurance company wants to get back the money it pays on those accidents.
But I wouldn't mind those getting some feedback, in the form of "ok, if you want to drive like a fucktard, you'll pay more because your kind of driver produces more accidents."
Yes, everyone thinks they're god's gift to the highway, the perfect driver, and that accidents only happen to other people. Even the ex-coleague who drove fast enough through town on rain to aquaplane (god knows what kind of speed that means, 'cause the speed limit isn't enough for that) and smash into a tree, thought he's the perfect driver. He spent a year in hospital and still didn't get the idea that maybe something's wrong with his driving.
In practice they aren't really safe drivers, nd they endanger everyone else too.
There _is_ a reason why speed limits are what they are. Because kinetic energy is proportional to the SQUARE of the the speed, while energy dissipated by braking is linear with the braking distance. Hence a car doing 70 km/h brakes in _twice_ the distance of one doing 50 km/h. Heck, at the point where the 50 km/h car fully stopped, the 70 km/h one is still doing 50 km/h.
Even if one can master the car at higher speeds in ideal driving situations, it's still unsafe. When some kid runs in front of your headlights, or some car goes out of parking right in front of you, the macho driven car at high speed will kill or maim while the safe driven one might actually stop.
So I wouldn't mind those getting hit in the wallet for being a menace.
Hmm... True enough. Well, that would make pretty much the whole thread pointless, since it was mostly based on the assumption that I'm still talking to whoever wrote that. Including the part about the employee having no recourse but to basically bend over. Which is really what got me irked.
Well, I must apologize, then. It was my mistake and I was argueing with the wrong person.
"You are so sure that I am not a good boss, and so sure that I am not hiring good people that you are blinded to the truth."
I do not even know the truth. All I have to base a judgment on are your words here.
And, as I was saying, arguing with a straight face that the boss can make one wear anything he wishes, or that a worker's only choice is to bend over and take it from the boss... well, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. The people I've met who had that kind of a one-sided and self-important view of the world were not fun people to work with.
Again, not even because of the suit, but because that kind of viewing their subordinates like peons also made them actually treat those people like peons. The border between "your only choice is to bend over and do whatever the boss's whim is" and for example "Golden Rule" boy's "bring a sleeping bag and don't leave the office until the program is ready" isn't even as much of a border as a cause-effect relationship.
Are you really like that? Or were you just going for hyperbole, to make a point? I wouldn't know. So I'm obviously answering just to what you wrote there.
"You have to be able to meet every bulleted job requirement, or you aren't "qualified". After that cut, I usually have hundreds of qualified programmers."
Even assuming that you have a few hundred who meet the requirements, the choices from there would be:
1. Treat those requirements as a base-line. Try to further sort even those, and see which are in fact _more_ qualified than that requirements baseline, or offer the best price/qualification ratio, or anything else job-related. There is no such thing as several hundred who are _identically_ qualified.
Or
2. you can just pick the nicest suit.
You're telling me you're picking number 2.
"Apparently that means he/she is full of bullshit, and a bullshitter"
Not necessarily. Claiming bogus qualifications and experience is more like what I meant by the bullshitting contest. Which _is_ usually the way to get hired by most companies. (Maybe not yours. I wouldn't know.)
"and that makes me a PHB"
If your criterion for hiring someone really is their suit, well, maybe that by itself isn't necessarily PHB material, but it does qualify as unfit for that particular job. Who knows, you may even be a good manager in the rest of the time. Or you may also reward show business instead of substance there. (Putting more worth on show than on substance can be a permanent frame of mind for some people.) I wouldn't know which. But in the particular business of conducting a hiring interview, sorting candidates by suit does not strike me as the competent way.
"You are drawing conclusions about unequal candidates and unequal workers, and associating their suit-wearing status as the cause, which is a fundamentally flawed equation."
No. I'm not saying that wearing a suit turns anyone into a bad worker. You may notice that I didn't criticize the co-workers I mentioned that occasionally wear suits.
I'm saying that the suit and the skill are completely orthogonal. Just like painting a car red doesn't make it either faster or slower, and new curtains on a restaurant don't improve the cuisine.
Hence, I can't care less if someone wears a suit or not, if that's their choice. I _will_ however doubt the competence of anyone who judges a car's speed by its colour, or someone's skill by a suit.
That's the point you seem to mis-understand about "the Slashdot circle-jerk" (in your words.) The whole point isn't that "wearing a suit == bad". Most of us couldn't care less what kind of a silly disguise you want to wear, be it a business suit or a Darth Vader costume. The real point is "judging people's skills by their suit == bad".
"You assume that asking you to wear a suit means I am a PHB, that I am incompetent, and that I am going to cause you more stress than not."
No. I'm saying that your "I'm the owner, I can make you wear or do anything I want" and "you can do what I want and whine on the internet about it" attitude in that message is what makes you a PHB.
I've had to deal with that kind of people. While I've avoided working directly for one lately, I've still met enough to form an opinion. One client PHB annoyed us by repeating "The golden rule is: who has the gold makes the rules, and that's me." Every half an hour. He treated his employees like dirt, because he's the one with the gold. And unsurprisingly that's why he needed us to do his coding: anyone who was at least semi-competent at coding, design or administration had left.
It's not just about suits, or not even mainly about suits. It's that anyone with that kind of "me king, you unwashed peon" attitude is not worth the bother of working for. They won't just demand a suit, which technically I could live with, they'll demand all sorts of other unreasonable stuff. The "golden rule" boy above demanded that we bring sleeping bags and noone leaves until we undo some changes he requested, and because we were past the original deadline... to implement those changes, and he had approved that time. Of course, we didn't, but it made me feel genuinely sorry for the few yes-men who were still his employees.
Basically, since you do mention respect and civilization, it goes both ways. It's not fun for you to have employees who don't respect you (by your skewed defition that involves suits.) Well, conversely, it's no fun for me to work for someone who doesn't respect his employees.
"The thing is, I can have both."
The thing is, everyone thinks they do. Yet 3 in 4 programmers can't actually program, and about 68% don't even know the basics of the language they're paid to program in. Someone must hire those, eh?
The hiring process industry-wide is just sick and non-functional. It's not just riddled with bullshit criteria (e.g., suits), and "please demonstrate your talent and inclination at bulshitting me creatively" kinds of bullshit questions (e.g., "what's your biggest deffect?"), it also most of the time doesn't even try to prove the important part: skill. Most people make it at best a bullshitting contest, where the one who can lie with a straight face gets the job.
"Two employees, virtually equal, one wearing a suit, one not, guess which will get hired 99% of the time?"
That's just the symptom of the bullshit hiring process I've described above. If you routinely end up with people that equal that you can just pick the nicest suit, you've probably not even tried to assess their skills. That, or had noone above entry-level skill interested in that job to start with.
"See, I can have a person who does great work, does a quality job, is well-rounded, and respects his/her job."
None of which involves putting up a show business for the PHB. Most people in the department I work for do a thoroughly great job, are well rounded in the way of _real_ skills (e.g., actually understanding a business process does more for their work than merely wearing a business suit does), and respect their job (at least in the sense of doing it professionally and well.) Funny how none of them need a suit for that.
Well, actually a couple of guys do occasionally wear a suit, but I can't say I've noticed their work's quality going up or down when they do it.
I figured it's a different topic, so I've split it into a different message. You say:
"You can be honest and give someone a survey with no benefit to them and you'll get mostly honest answers back."
Actually, anthropology studies say people will lie like there's no tomorrow in surveys.
Or let me rephrase that: they won't consciously "lie". They'll subconsciously skew their answers towards those they consider "right".
See, each of us likes to think he/she/it is a better person. In fact, we actually honestly believe we _are_ better than we are. (E.g., if you ask a bunch of Christians, _noone_ thinks they're personally among those going to Hell.) We think we're more moral, better workers, and more socially acceptable to boot.
So any answers in a survey will reflect that idealized self-perception, rather than reality.
E.g., if a community's ideology is that everyone is helping each others, the results you'll get in a survey will illustrate that. Yeah, we all work our fields together, help build each other's house, etc. Even if in reality the last time anyone helped another build a house was in '47 or so.
E.g., if a tribe's culture values hunters and warriors more than anything else, everyone will declare themselves a warrior and hunter in a survey. Even if 90% of their food actually comes from agriculture, and half the rest is imported.
"There's a really simple way to make sure that you get fairly accurate results on surveys or market research... don't offer incentives. People will lie their asses off to get free stuff."
Well, that's very insightful, but that's the problem. Their own incentive and free stuff may still exist anyway. Self-respect is a very valuable thing to get as "free stuff" there.
Plus there also is the factor of picking the answers that you think will please the guy/gal doing the survey. We're social beings and most of people have been educated to "be nice".
Drug testing is based on the assumption that you're dealing with a human kind of biology. That's what they're testing. It's not like you have a major biological difference between those who opt to take part, and those who don't.
And if someone did discover that, say, the resistance in antibiotics is higher in those who take part in drug trials than in those who don't, that would indeed be reason enough to doubt that testing.
That's the whole point: for your results to be any use, the sample you use and the data you collect has got to be representative. A sample and a data set that are massively skewed, becomes of very limited use and credibility.
So let's get back to this particular research.
1. The data itself may be skewed, if you let people decide which data they submit.
Some data is considered confidential, and rightfully so. E.g., I'd rather not do my bank transactions through some fly-by-night company's proxies. (Same applies to your drug testing surveys: if your survey relied on people giving you their banking data, you can bet that you'd get lies.)
Some data carries a certain stigma. E.g., if I were to buy a subscription to a paid porn site, I probably wouldn't want someone collecting _that_ data about me.
2. There's also no indication that the sample is actually representative for anything.
E.g., in your drug testing research, if you're testing a drug that acts on the prostate, you'll want at least some of your test subjects to actually have one. If you're testing a contraceptive pill for women, you'll want at least some of your test subjects to have a womb and ovaries.
If there is strong indication that your sample is in fact not representative at all for what you're trying to study, then the relevance of the result is at best questionable.
It's not really about the stance on spyware, but about the validity of their market statistics.
E.g., if you exclude all Mac users, you'll get the very clear (but very false) image that there is exactly zero market for Tiger or for anything Mac-related.
E.g., if you base your sample on people who took it for the free anti-virus, surprise, your statistics will say that noone buys anti-viruses.
So that's the problem and the question: is such a skewed sample even capable of producing meaningful results?
"If you own a company you can have your employees wear whatever you want. If you don't own the company you work at, then you can wear what they tell you to wear, and you're free to moan on the Internet."
No, I can also find another job, for someone who doesn't get ego-trips from pretending he's god. It may come as a surprise to your ego, but you're not _that_ important.
Even with the job market depression, there still _is_ plenty of market for people who actually have skills. So if you treat people badly, the ones who _can_ find a better job, _will_ find a better job. The ones whose _only_ skill is sucking up to a retard are the ones you're very quickly left with.
So basically, if you own a company, you can choose to pay for skills, or you can choose to pay a bunch of sad monkeys to play along in your ego-trip shows. Sure, it's your decision. If you own the company, by all means, you're free to take the idiotic choice. But it doesn't mean I have to respect someone's taking stupid decisions.
"I don't see what people have against suits. They look and feel good."
Actually, it's not about suits as such, it's about form-over-substance and PHB attitudes.
If you're the kind of "I'm god and can make you wear a chastity belt if I want to" PHB, I don't want to work for you. That job will be more stress than it's worth it.
If you're the kind that hires any monkey based on suit, rather than skill, chances are I won't like working for you. I'd be stuck with a huge team of co-workers who can't even tie their shoelaces, and get more bogged down in getting their buggy crap to run than in actually doing my job.
"I think it comes from the general anti-social attitude of the geeks on this website, they probably grew up with parents who didn't discipline them properly, let them sit at the computer for 16 hours a day, never taught them any manners or social graces."
Ah, the poor-man's attempt at psychology. Here's a free hint: leave that to people who are qualified. Pretending to be some expert in things you obviously don't even understand, is _the_ management fuck-up that I respect the _least_. It just makes you look like a PHB.
But to humour you, my parents were actually very strict. They didn't even leave me much time for the computer, or much else. They also did teach me respect for competence, taking pride in a work well done, basing one's self-respect on actual achievements rather than being the popular sheep in a crowd, and that critically thinking for oneself is good.
Which in the end is what this is all about. I _can_ and _do_ respect genuine competence, including in management or anything else. I am thoroughly disgusted by sad clowns who do their job badly. Including, again, in management.
"This means they naturally rebel against civilised behaviour, such as wearing correct business attire."
There is nothing "correct" or "incorrect" about it as such. It's just a social ritual, nothing more.
So the question is whether you want to pay for rituals (including suits, verbal masturbation meetings, etc) or for getting the job done. If you want rituals, sure, feel free to pay for rituals. But then you've just told me that you're incompetent at doing your real job, and mis-use corporate funds for your little ritual entertainment.
So, see above: I don't respect incompetence.
In other words, YOU are incompetent
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Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 1
Has it ever occured to you that management is all about managing resources? Including _human_ resources?
E.g., that if it were a construction company, they have different jobs that require different skills? Some people are good at driving a bulldozer, some are in charge of purchasing materials, some are qualified to operate a crane, some do the accounting, some are marketting, etc. No sane company would expect the crane driver to also be a marketting guy and a lawyer and...
No, neither of them is irreplaceable, but the manager's job is nevertheless to hire the right ones. You need to hire a crane guy _and_ an accountant _and_ some truck drivers _and_ some guys who actually lay bricks _and_ an electrician or two, etc. You need all the right pieces to fill in the puzzle.
That's what a manager's job is about. Believe it or not, you're there to do that job, not just to pretend you're some royalty.
Yet here you are demanding that _everyone_ be good both at "representing your group" and "giving public speeches" _and_ at getting the work done. That your engineers and marketters are some interchangeable resource, and everyone must work equally well in two very unrelated roles.
Do you even pay well enough to actually get the few people who actually mastered two unrelated skills? People who are actually _good_ at two unrelated skills cost more than those who are good at one. It's like asking for someone who's both an painter and a good music composer: they exist, but are few and far in between. Expect to pay a premium to actually get one, much less a whole team.
So again, the manager's job is to find out how many of each you need. Demanding that everyone has all possible skills isn't even economically viable.
So you're telling me... what? That instead of X people who are good at marketting, and Y people who are good at engineering, you have (X+Y) who are piss-poor at both? They're not even good marketters, if all you judged is their suit. And you definitely didn't even try to sort them by engineering skills, if in your world everyone works interchangeably.
Heh.
"Will I feel akward having this person give a public speech? Will I feel weird standing next to this person at a trade conference?"
Ah, insecurity.
Here's just an idea for you: some of us take pride, and base our self-esteem, on our _skills_, not our suits. While you're telling me that your version doesn't even just depend on _your_ suit, but on being in the right looking group of suits? Geesh, talk about an insecure lemming.
"There are dozens of people like you. You are interchangeable. You probably aren't especially well qualified for the job over anyone else."
If you only hire incompetents in suits, I'm not surprised noone in your team was ever more qualified at any job than anyone else. There is just one point were that kind of uniformity exists, and that is the point of _zero_ competence. (Or close enough.)
The farther you move from that point, the bigger a variety you get in the N-dimensional space of skills. You start getting people who are good at marketting, but bad at engineering, or viceversa. You start getting people who can program Java very well, but don't even understand the bare basics of Unix administration, or viceversa. Etc.
Re:Know Your Enemy *is* 'stuff that matters'
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Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, here are a few ideas:
1. Information Roadblocks. The reason some managers take stupid decisions, is that some other managers below them are yes-men. A decision is only as good as the information it's based on, which includes the feedback from previous decisions. If the feedback only consists of "yes, sir" and "great idea, sir", well expect not just a slippery slope, but a steep one.
He/she/it just has nothing to balance the PR and marketting bullshit he's fed. The nice marketting guy, sure, comes and says that the new Snake Oil (TM) Enterprise Edition framework is the greatest thing since the wheel, it will solve world hunger, aids, and make any project take 21 days including testing. There are people much lower who know this is bull or unapplicable to their project, but the information from them has disappeared along the chain of command.
2. Ass Covering. Taking some stupid decision that just follows some stupid guideline is safe. At worst there'll be some corporate meetings whether to change the guideline, but you are safe.
3. Its variant: stupid is good. Taking a decision based on exact numbers and calculations is something that can be attacked. Taking a decision purely based on fuzzy buzzwords is safe.
Take stuff like "scalable" (even if it means "you can use a mainframe to get the same speed as other products get on a 486"), "industry standard" (usually meaning "no actual ISO/ECMA/whatever standard, but whatever wantonly changing format/API/whatever we jokingly call a standard"), "lower TCO" (compared to building a pyramid and carving your data on its walls), "synergy" (if you buy our hardware and our software, you'll also need our expensive consultants to make it work, which is a good synergystic effect for _us_), etc. How can you disprove something like "scalable", when basically _any_ program ever written scales with a bigger computer, and _any_ web application scales with a load balancer?
4. Ego trips. (Those unwashed peons have no business imagining they can question my god-like perfection. Of course my decisions are nothing short of perfect, because I'm the boss.)
5. Much to the same effect, but different disease: insecurity. (Maybe if I ask those developpers what that means they'll think I'm stupid. Let's read some buzzwords from some IT-for-managers ragazine and pretend I'm some guru by throwing around technical-sounding babble. Better yet, let's take decisions based on some ad disguised as an article, written by some paid shill who never actually used that technology.)
6. Last, but probably most important: we software developpers are notoriously bad at explaining things. We get bogged in religious details like RISC-vs-CISC, big-vs-little endian, emacs-vs-vi, BSD-vs-Linux (Linux-vs-Windows is old hat already for some co-workers), Eclipse-vs-Netbeans, etc, and fail to properly address the _real_ things that interest a manager. For him the program runs just as well on RISC or on CISC, on Linux or Windows or BSD, and the important thing is "how much will it cost?"
We also tend to complain lots, and the above arguing about details also is perceived as complaining about anything. And again, we fail to explain _why_ and _how_ that detail affects the bottom line. A lot of managers are left with the impression that "bah, no matter what you buy, they'll complain anyway. So I might as well buy whatever looks better to me."
"Why blow money on both Zeldas if you don't like 'em?"
In my case, out of curiosity, and because I could easily afford it. I buy lots and lots of games anyway. I have 3 bookcases literally _full_ with just the games I bought since 1999. Literally. I'm a games addict. I play some 60-70 hours a week. I need lots of games for that.
Anyway, some people seemed to like the Zeldas, so, hey, I wanted to give them a try. Can't know if you like it until you try it, right? Turns out I didn't like them at all, but hey.
Still, it wasn't a complete loss. Both my old parents liked at least Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64, so at least that was some use out of my N64. Haven't gotten them to play the Zeldas, though, but can't win 'em all:)
"If you like your ultra blocky "realistic" games then good for you."
Actually, I've been known to argue against "realism" if it gets in the way of gameplay. And most of the time it does. So I can see your point. Most of the times games who claim to be "realistic" just use that as an excuse for bad game design.
Personally I'm into the gameplay and story part of it. Obviously, though, my idea of what's good gameplay differs from yours. But I like to think that that's just normal.
"There are a lot of people (not all) who claim that your Marios' and Sonic type games are boring so that they look cool"
I'm not even sure in what adult circles it's considered cool to be a gaming nerd. Adults like to pretend that gaming is for kids, and that they themselves have a life. That's the real way to be "cool".
"Why blow $20-$50 on something that is just not "sophisticated enough"and grownup enough?"
Have you considered that a lot of people do have kids or a spouse? Tastes aren't uniform within a family, you know.
E.g., my father is the ultra-competitive type, so he plays Counter-Strike. His idea of fun is showing everyone that he's the greatest in every single way.
My mother plays generally simple things along the lines of tetris. According to her, it's because she can use only reflexes and still think of whatever she wants to think about.
So in that family you'd already find two very different groups of games on the sheves. And it was even more diverse than that back when me and my brother lived there.
Probably the biggest advantage is that it's cheaper. (Although if by much, that remains to be seen.)
Plus, AMD's promise was something like being able to double the number of CPUs without having to buy a new motherboard. Though how much saving that will be (I expect AMD to price these pretty high), and whether it will mean that you're stuck with much slower cores to keep the TDP limits, that remains to be seen.
There are other possibilities for improvement, such as using a shared cache and IMC instead of just throwing two cores together and going over HT like on a dual CPU system. But AMD hasn't yet done that.
"When I was a kid. I never understood why grownups stopped watching cartoons."
Well, I never did stop.
"Who wants to sneak around with a square head with a "Realistic" face painted on?"
I don't. I pick games where that doesn't happen.
"Who wants to fall asleep while playing a game with a depressing and slow storyline?"
I don't. I look for games with an interesting story that keeps me interested until the end. Any other questions?
"Kiddy or not, I have fun."
Bingo. So do I. Just not with the same games.
"I never wanted to grow up to be some boring fella who could only find enjoyment in boringness."
Well, here's the thing you can't seem to get into your head: some of us don't find those other genres boring at all. Some of those games I've used as examples count on _my_ scale, around the point of "most fun one can have with the clothes on." And conversely, we too find _your_ favourites to be the epitome of boring brain-damage.
(Which is actually the whole point of why Nintendo loses market share: you can't just tell people to stop liking something and start liking something else. They keep giving me only stuff I find boring, I won't buy it.)
E.g., as I've said before, I actually went and bought both N64 Zeldas. I was bored out of my skull in 10 minutes flat. I still remember how idiotic, pointless and boring I found it in Ocarina Of Time to jump around on stuff, using flowers as propellers. Or take Mario 64 or Donkey Kong 64. WTF is supposed to be fun about pointlessly jumping on stuff like a retard? I got bored stiff in minutes. Etc.
The difference is that I can understand that different people have different tastes: what's fun for me might be boring for you, and viceversa. It's just normal. I'm not telling you that your tastes are boring and wrong because they don't match mine. While you seem stuck in the notion that only your tastes are right, and you can just proclaim everyone else's tastes wrong.
Which is like if I came saying that everyone should like the taste of milk (because I do) and hate apples (because I do). I mean, hey, everyone must have the same tastes I have right? Nobody can possibly actually like apples, or be lactose intollerant, right? I like to think you can see what's wrong with that kind of a notion.
"At least with Zelda I can tell my actual playing ability is getting better, whereas with Final Fantasy, you just have to chalk-up more hours to get your character stronger, so that they cause more damage, and have a better hit percentage."
In other words, Zelda has totally different gameplay, a totally different game system, and totally different mechanics. I.e., for all practical purposes it's a completely different genre.
I'm not saying one genre is better than the other or anything. It would be as stupid as arguing whether RTS is better than FPS: if someone wants a FPS and hates RTS, there's no way a RTS will be a substitute for his favourte genre. And same here, for someone who actually wanted to play FF, Zelda is _not_ a substitute.
Thank you, you've just made my point for me.
"Of course, as soon as Square started making Final Fantasy for the Playstation, the Final Fanstasy series lost its appeal."
For you, maybe. For others, FF7 sold more Playstations than Sony's marketting and all Sony games combined. Probably half the Playstations ever sold were sold because of Square.
So as I've said in the beginning: don't assume that everyone has the same tastes you do. If you fall in Nintendo's target niche, good for you. But there's also a lot of us who'll gladly take "watching 5 minutes cutscenes" over pointlessly jumping on stuff any day. That's all I'm saying: not everyone is you.
As for RPGs, well, the PC indeed had some good ones, but they were few and far in between, back in the day of the PSX-vs-N64. Sure, you had some gems like Fallout 1 and 2 or Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment. (KOTOR and Morrowind came _much_ later.) But that meant something like 1 good RPG per year.
By contrast, the PSX had a couple dozens per year. You can probably see how even for us PC RPG gamers the Playstation was a very tempting proposition. And how the N64 was just not a contender for that market segment.
But PC gaming was also always a niche market itself, compared to the larger and more lucrative console market. Don't get me wrong, the PC has some great games, but the cost of hardware to run them well has always been an issue. Back then, even more: a high-end PC used to cost some 2000 dollars, a console was 300 dollars. So more people had a console than a PC.
So there IMHO was (and still is) a whole market who really just faced the choice "do I get a Nintendo or a Sony", and the PC was a non-factor. And there it boils down to "which of those has games that match my personal preferences."
Nintendo painted itself into a corner by cattering to just a niche. There were a lot of genres which just were not available at all on a N64. So fans of those genres really had no reason whatsoever to buy a N64 or Nintendo's games.
(Incidentally, yep, it's very insightful that you mention Sega there. One of the main complaints about the Dreamcast was the same: whole genres were missing. Heck, I was a Sega fanboy, and even I was irked that you couldn't find a good Dreamcast RPG for love or money for the first two years or so.)
Plus Nintendo's flogging the dead horse that games are only for kids was a bad maneuver. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have made games for kids too. But focusing _only_ on that corporate image drove away the lucrative market of adult gamers. Bad move: even for kids, it's the parents that pay for the console. Sony bet on having games that Mom and Dad too can play, and it paid off.
Basically I'm saying that it wasn't just a question of pumping money into something. It was a question of making it useful for more people.
Sure, the PS2 had bad load times and its graphics indeed didn't really live up to the hype. But whatever genre you preferred, you could find one on the PS2. On the other hand, most genres weren't available for love or money on a GameCube.
Basically it's the difference between "overrated" and "useless". Sure, the PS2 can be filed under "overrated", but for anyone falling outside of Nintendo's target niche the N64 or GameCube fell squarely under "useless". That's what really made the difference, IMHO. If that's the choice, I'd rather buy something overrated than something useless for me.
I'm not sure exactly what deal was there between Sony and Square. All that mattered as a gamer was that suddenly the good games (for my taste) were on the Playstation, whereas the N64 had zero games I was interested in.
However, I do know that:
- a lot of other developpers just preferred the Playstation. I don't think Sony paid them all off.
- Making games for the Playstation was more profitable. Nintendo has a long history of trying to make others foot the bill. E.g., see how once they tried to announce a GameCube price cut to a level barely above what the retailers paid to Nintendo for it. Basically trying via hype to make the retailers take all the price cut, to help sell Nintendo's crap.
In the case of developpers, developping for Nintendo's cartridge format didn't leave you with much money out of selling those games. That went a long way to convince developpers jump ship to Sony.
- Nintendo's snotty attitude did not help, either. Nintendo still hadn't gotten past it's SNES times ego trip.
(You'd think that the anti-monopoly gang on/. wouldn't forget this easily the way Nintendo tried to bully developpers into submission, and tried to enforce contracts that basically said "If you want to make games for our console, you peon, sign here that you're never ever allowed to make games for any other system.")
Nintendo didn't even try to meet those third party developpers half way, or at least listen. The attitude was "Fuck, you. We're the Big N, you're the peon. You're the one who'll be sorry you left."
If you think you can live off selling games for a console whose market share is shrinking fast, tell that to Sega. They were at that point once too: all Dreamcast owners were happily buying Sega's games, but not many people were actually buying a new Dreamcast unless Sega gave it away almost for free. (Partially _because_ of lack of 3rd party support and whole genres being completely absent until the last few months.)
Ask them how well their Dreamcast did in that situation. Oh, wait, it didn't. Sega dropped the Dreamcast and exitted the console market completely.
Nintendo isn't as profitable as you think in the non-portable console market. Most of their money comes from the lucrative gameboy market, where, surprise, they do have 3rd party support. So if your big hopes for Nintendo include screwing up in that market too, by driving away the developpers, you might just see Nintendo go the way of Sega.
See, 3rd party support isn't that bad a thing as you assume. Those 3rd party developpers for Sony and MS actually have a positive effect on Sony's or MS's income:
1. Sony _does_ make some money (and in fact good money) out of each game sold for their system, even if it's from a third party developper. In case you wondered why a new PS2 game costs more than a new PC game, that's why: that difference goes directly into Sony's bank account. And
2. More titles means more people buying their consoles, which means more people buying the games, _and_ more games they can sell to each PS2 owner. Which drives up the income from the previous paragraph pretty much quadratically.
The reason Nintendo did well was basically that they sell cheap stuff, _not_ that it's so profitable to lack 3rd party support. Their consoles have the cheapest hardware of all contenders, and their games have two digit polygon counts. That's cheap to make, so you need to sell less of them to make a profit.
But if their market share shrinks far enough, even that may well become non-profitable.
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Several applications in the background do _not_ count, because those can and do get different data and code segments. You _can_ support that without going 64 bit, and Intel's Xeon addressing did so for years already.
So does Photoshop allocate a single array of more than 4 GB? I seriously doubt that.
At 4 bytes per pixel (32 bit colour) you'd need more than 1 _billion_ pixels in a photo. I.e., you'd need to work on a picture larger than 32768 pixel tall and and 32768 wide.
Even if you print it in 300 dpi (most posters are printed in a much more coarse resolution) and wanted each dot to be its individual pixel, we're talking a roughly 110x110 inch area. I.e., a 9x9 ft poster. (About 3m by 3m in metric.)
That's already billboard sized, and those are definitely printed in an order of magnitude lower DPI.
I don't know, I just don't see many home users actually working on 32k by 32k pictures, or not every day. Heck, I doubt that any professional artist does that daily.
Well, to put it otherwise, I'm not concerned with _good_ parents. Those will be good parents even with a V chip or whatever. Who knows, maybe they'll even get some good use out of it.
So if you're a good parent, hey, you have my respect. God knows you don't have an easy job there. And in that case, I don't believe the chip will turn you into a bad parent anyway. So in that case, you're not among those I'm concerned about.
I'm really just concerned with the "jerks" (in your words) you describe. Those _will_ use any available excuse to avoid their kids.
And, well, that's all I'm saying (and as far as I can tell, what everyone bashing the chip in this thread is saying): for _those_, the V chip just promises to be another excuse.
Now you do bring a valid point that the extreme cases avoid their kids well enough already. That's a very insightful observation.
But I'm more concerned with the dark-grey case who haven't as much completely given up, but rather given up on even trying to do it _well_. The kind that's just doing the absolute minimum that allows them to say with a straight face that they've done their duty, or at least tried. In some cases it doesn't even take much for that straight case.
Such a chip has the potential to allow those to spend even less time with the kid. Whereas previously they might have _occasionally_ felt an urge to see wth the kid is playing, and maybe put up a token fuss about it, now they can just install a chip and never think about it again.
You know, for all the bullshit about how Linux is ahead of MS in the 64 bit department, that's _not_ my experience with it.
Sometime during th last half of last year, i.e., after more than a year of "Linux is 64 bit already" bullshit, I actually gave it a try. Gentoo, to be precise. Let me tell you how it worked:
There were almost no drivers for anything. Not for the hard drive, not for AGP, not for anything. And that was on a Via K8T800 chipset, i.e., the chipset the A64 was launched with.
Which is just as well, because ATI also had no 64 bit drivers for my 9800 XT. I ended up staring into a 60 Hz VESA Framebuffer display for about a week before I uninstalled it.
And you know how slow that framebuffer was? Let's just say it's the first time I saw DSL downloads being braked by the speed of updating the progress bar.
But maybe it had 64 bit applications? Nope, guess again. No 64 bit OpenOffice, no 64 bit Eclipse, not one goddamn app I needed to use was ported yet. Just for a lark I tried emerging Pingus. (God knows the framebuffer speed didn't promise to be good for a game.) Guess what? That one wasn't 64 bit ready, either.
So you folks are telling me... what? That a freakin' useless system with no apps and no drivers counts as being ahead of MS? Yeah, right. That MS sucks for not loading 32 bit drivers... just like Linux didn't load ATI's 32 bit drivers? That MS's marketting is more guilty than the bleating zealots promoting a Linux system without drivers or apps as a finished and production-ready solution?
Sometimes this kind of zealotry strikes me like doing more harm than good. I can tell you that _I_ am not looking forward to trying 64 bit Linux again. (And I'm writing this in Konqueror in 32 bit mode Gentoo linux right now, so you can spare the "Redmond fanboy" wisecracks.) I think other people who got tricked by that zealotry would be even less inclined to give it another try, ever.
It may not be obvious, but _some_ truth in advertising can go a long way. Yes, we're all nerds, we're all outraged as the "creative puffering" that marketting does. But one-upping them via outright lies and outright promoting an unfinished product where only the kernel and GCC is anywhere near 64 bit ready, well, is just a way to shoot the whole Linux community in the foot.
It may not be obvious, but the _only_ use and reason to live of a computer or an OS is to run an apps, and of those is to solve a problem the user has. Same as a tool. You don't buy a microwave oven as an ideological statement against gas ovens, you buy them to actually heat some stuff in them. Same with computers.
And there a tool which sorta is imperfect beats a tool which is completely useless any day.
That's the problem with the mindless zealotry: you sold someone a solution based on _your_ ideology, rather than his needs, you've lost him as a customer for good. That tool from MS is very very imperfect, yes, but it does run Paintshop, some games, etc. It does what Joe Average wants. If your big ideology win is selling Joe a tool which doesn't do that, you haven't converted him, you've just gained someone who'll tell all his friends to stay off that Linux crap.
Just food for thought.
The thing that sucked about 16 bit addressing was if you needed more than 64k in _one_ _block_. It wasn't the total RAM (any computer had more than 64k for years), it was the addressing inside one block larger than 64k that was the problem.
E.g., take as little as a 640x480 bitmap in 16 colours (4 bit). We're talking some 150k. Now try 16 bit colour: 600k. Even addressing a pixel in that involved segment maths.
_That_ was why 32 bit had a very clear advantages.
Is 64 bit that necessary nowadays? I doubt it. Is there any desktop program out there which actually allocates more than 4 gigabytes in a single block?
The point isn't that the software as such is good or bad. The point is that relying on panacea and magic talismans can actually be _worse_. You know why? Because relying on some miracle snake oil can make one actually do less of the effective things.
Before you know it, half the parents will spend even less time with their kids, because hey now we have a bullshit chip to supervise the kid.
Childhood is an age when we're hard-coded to learn. We want to know why the sky is blue, why Jerry hits Tom upside the head with a frying pan, and occasionally why the nice lady in the porn mag that Timmy stole from his parents is taking it up the ass.
And as a parent your (admittedly uncomfortable) job is to provide those answers. Because otherwise someone else will. The questions don't disappear because you pretend something doesn't exist: it just makes the kid get the answers from someone else.
Hoping that your kid never even learns that violence or sex even exist is _not_ the solution. And I don't mean just "not the effective solution", but simply "not a solution."
Raising someone to be a good moral person is a very noble goal indeed. But the way is to talk to them. To explain the _what_ and the _why_ part of that morals system. To be there for them when they actually have a question.
Because if they don't learn that from you, you learn that from someone else. And learn it wrong.
If you aren't there to explain to them _why_ beating someone up is wrong, they _will_ learn from school that being a violent bully is way cool. And blocking Mortal Kombat won't do a damn thing to prevent that.
So basically that is the whole problem: not that such a chip is bad as such. The problem is that it allows even more parents to avoid talking to their kid. Which just means more kids will end up learning their morals off the street, instead of from their parents.
Well, just wanted to say I think you're right, but IMHO we need to see the bigger picture than just "human speech == intelligence."
Honestly, most species have evolved some kinds of intelligence, far beyond what many humans credit them with. IMHO the parrots are a more interesting case because they can actually articulate human words, but I wouldn't discount the intelligence of animals who lack a suitable larynx for that. Everything you describe, except for actually articulating words, can be observed in at least half the mammal species I can think of.
In some cases it's not even just learning by imitation.
E.g., cats not only can learn, but are actively taught by their mother. If you've ever had a cat with kittens, you've probably noticed how she talks to them for hours. (And likely got annoyed when she does it at 4 AM.)
And if you take a kitten from his/her mom very early, he/she'll grow up to be a bit of a retarded cat. So all that meowing at night wasn't just socializing.
This isn't necessarily to say "cats are smart", but rather that most species evolved towards some kind of "smart". Natural selection favours adaptability, and adapting by learning is the most efficient kind.
Sharing information with other members of the species, i.e. _some_ form of speech (even if it means meowing, barking or chirping) was also a very immediate survival advantage. E.g., for most species of animals it's a very real advantage to be able to tell your cubs "hide!" or "come here, I brought you dinner" and the like.
In the cats' case, it's obviously a language that can transmit behaviour information to the kitten. Probably not as complex or as capable of abstraction as human language, but complex enough to tell that kitten how to act in certain circumstances, or what its priorities should be. (E.g., "wash yourself often". Cats taken very early from their mother do it less often than ones who got taught.) I.e., it might be more complex than a parrot's learning to say "hi" and "goodbye".
So basically, yeah, I'd guess that life anywhere, in any conditions, would probably tend to evolve towards some kind of intelligence and communication capabilities.
You know, I have one particularly retarded alarm going off every fucking day where I live. Sometimes at night. If that's a bird, I swear I'm getting a shotgun :P
The whole "waah, but they suck me dry with tickets" complaint starts from the false premise that the mean police/government/whatever just taxes you, and there's nothing you can possibly do to avoid that. Well, false: you can stop speeding already, and you'll get no more tickets. It's that simple.
Frankly, I don't think endangering others is some sacred right. Cars can and do kill or cripple. More people die or end up crippled in a year, _any_ year, than in all aircraft-related accidents combined, _including_ the 9/11. That's why all those laws are there in the first place.
And the real issue isn't even getting home faster, which usually isn't even the achieved result. The issue is: thanks to the ads of the car industry some decades ago, the artifficial image was created that powerful cars are some supremely manly thing. That driving anything less than a 200 HP gas-guzzler, and/or god forbid actually driving it carefully or at the speed limit, is akin to wearing an "I have a small dick" banner.
And if they only endangered themselves, I wouldn't even have anything against it. I always said that more people should be encouraged to nominate themselves for the Darwin Awards.But unfortunately these people don't only endanger themselves, they also endanger everyone else on the road.
And I'll be damned if I see anything wrong with sucking them dry. Stuff them with tickets until they finally get it in their head that yes, they too are supposed to obey the speed limit. I'll drink to that.
Or here's a better idea that doesn't even involve turning it into a revenue source: death penalty. No, I'm not kidding. If you get involved in _any_ accident, including "but he just appeared in front of me", and you were over the speed limit, you get to swing by the neck to death. No ifs, no buts, no atenuating circumstances.
Because that's just the kind of thing that the speed limit is there to prevent. The issue isn't what you can do with the car in ideal conditions. The issue is when someone backed out of a parking lot in front of you, or some kid jumped in front of your headlights, or the car in front has to brake, or whatever. _Then_ it starts to matter that braking distance increases with the square of the speed.
Insurance rates are already based on extensive statistics of accidents and costs. The insurance company wants the income to equal the expenses plus X% profit margin. (Where X can't be sky-high because there still is some competition there.)
And that's where the statistics come in.
E.g., cars that look sportsy will have a higher accident rate than something that looks like a Peugeot 106 or VW Lupo or Ford Fiesta. Because every college kid trying to impress college girls (and some mid-life crisis men for the same reason) will buy one of those and drive like a fucktard.
Unfortunately, this also illustrates another problem: like any statistics that don't include _your_ driving style, you're penalized for stuff outside your control.
So basically there are classes of cars where you're penalized not for the car's being itself unsafe or actually a race car (hence needing better reflexes at its top speed) or anything, but because it looks cool enough to be bought by retards.
So personally I see nothing wrong with taking individual skill into account. If I bought a cool looking car and drive it only in town and only at or below the speed limit, I wouldn't mind paying less insurance than the fucktards with an added wing and 4" exhaust (even seen one on a 1.1 litre engine car) and try to look cool by driving like a public menace.
Of course, you are right, that does mean that the ones who aren't in the safe driving group will pay more, because they _are_ in a group that produces more accidents. And as I've said, the insurance company wants to get back the money it pays on those accidents.
But I wouldn't mind those getting some feedback, in the form of "ok, if you want to drive like a fucktard, you'll pay more because your kind of driver produces more accidents."
Yes, everyone thinks they're god's gift to the highway, the perfect driver, and that accidents only happen to other people. Even the ex-coleague who drove fast enough through town on rain to aquaplane (god knows what kind of speed that means, 'cause the speed limit isn't enough for that) and smash into a tree, thought he's the perfect driver. He spent a year in hospital and still didn't get the idea that maybe something's wrong with his driving.
In practice they aren't really safe drivers, nd they endanger everyone else too.
There _is_ a reason why speed limits are what they are. Because kinetic energy is proportional to the SQUARE of the the speed, while energy dissipated by braking is linear with the braking distance. Hence a car doing 70 km/h brakes in _twice_ the distance of one doing 50 km/h. Heck, at the point where the 50 km/h car fully stopped, the 70 km/h one is still doing 50 km/h.
Even if one can master the car at higher speeds in ideal driving situations, it's still unsafe. When some kid runs in front of your headlights, or some car goes out of parking right in front of you, the macho driven car at high speed will kill or maim while the safe driven one might actually stop.
So I wouldn't mind those getting hit in the wallet for being a menace.
Hmm... True enough. Well, that would make pretty much the whole thread pointless, since it was mostly based on the assumption that I'm still talking to whoever wrote that. Including the part about the employee having no recourse but to basically bend over. Which is really what got me irked.
Well, I must apologize, then. It was my mistake and I was argueing with the wrong person.
"You are so sure that I am not a good boss, and so sure that I am not hiring good people that you are blinded to the truth."
I do not even know the truth. All I have to base a judgment on are your words here.
And, as I was saying, arguing with a straight face that the boss can make one wear anything he wishes, or that a worker's only choice is to bend over and take it from the boss... well, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. The people I've met who had that kind of a one-sided and self-important view of the world were not fun people to work with.
Again, not even because of the suit, but because that kind of viewing their subordinates like peons also made them actually treat those people like peons. The border between "your only choice is to bend over and do whatever the boss's whim is" and for example "Golden Rule" boy's "bring a sleeping bag and don't leave the office until the program is ready" isn't even as much of a border as a cause-effect relationship.
Are you really like that? Or were you just going for hyperbole, to make a point? I wouldn't know. So I'm obviously answering just to what you wrote there.
"You have to be able to meet every bulleted job requirement, or you aren't "qualified". After that cut, I usually have hundreds of qualified programmers."
Even assuming that you have a few hundred who meet the requirements, the choices from there would be:
1. Treat those requirements as a base-line. Try to further sort even those, and see which are in fact _more_ qualified than that requirements baseline, or offer the best price/qualification ratio, or anything else job-related. There is no such thing as several hundred who are _identically_ qualified.
Or
2. you can just pick the nicest suit.
You're telling me you're picking number 2.
"Apparently that means he/she is full of bullshit, and a bullshitter"
Not necessarily. Claiming bogus qualifications and experience is more like what I meant by the bullshitting contest. Which _is_ usually the way to get hired by most companies. (Maybe not yours. I wouldn't know.)
"and that makes me a PHB"
If your criterion for hiring someone really is their suit, well, maybe that by itself isn't necessarily PHB material, but it does qualify as unfit for that particular job. Who knows, you may even be a good manager in the rest of the time. Or you may also reward show business instead of substance there. (Putting more worth on show than on substance can be a permanent frame of mind for some people.) I wouldn't know which. But in the particular business of conducting a hiring interview, sorting candidates by suit does not strike me as the competent way.
"You are drawing conclusions about unequal candidates and unequal workers, and associating their suit-wearing status as the cause, which is a fundamentally flawed equation."
No. I'm not saying that wearing a suit turns anyone into a bad worker. You may notice that I didn't criticize the co-workers I mentioned that occasionally wear suits.
I'm saying that the suit and the skill are completely orthogonal. Just like painting a car red doesn't make it either faster or slower, and new curtains on a restaurant don't improve the cuisine.
Hence, I can't care less if someone wears a suit or not, if that's their choice. I _will_ however doubt the competence of anyone who judges a car's speed by its colour, or someone's skill by a suit.
That's the point you seem to mis-understand about "the Slashdot circle-jerk" (in your words.) The whole point isn't that "wearing a suit == bad". Most of us couldn't care less what kind of a silly disguise you want to wear, be it a business suit or a Darth Vader costume. The real point is "judging people's skills by their suit == bad".
"You assume that asking you to wear a suit means I am a PHB, that I am incompetent, and that I am going to cause you more stress than not."
No. I'm saying that your "I'm the owner, I can make you wear or do anything I want" and "you can do what I want and whine on the internet about it" attitude in that message is what makes you a PHB.
I've had to deal with that kind of people. While I've avoided working directly for one lately, I've still met enough to form an opinion. One client PHB annoyed us by repeating "The golden rule is: who has the gold makes the rules, and that's me." Every half an hour. He treated his employees like dirt, because he's the one with the gold. And unsurprisingly that's why he needed us to do his coding: anyone who was at least semi-competent at coding, design or administration had left.
It's not just about suits, or not even mainly about suits. It's that anyone with that kind of "me king, you unwashed peon" attitude is not worth the bother of working for. They won't just demand a suit, which technically I could live with, they'll demand all sorts of other unreasonable stuff. The "golden rule" boy above demanded that we bring sleeping bags and noone leaves until we undo some changes he requested, and because we were past the original deadline... to implement those changes, and he had approved that time. Of course, we didn't, but it made me feel genuinely sorry for the few yes-men who were still his employees.
Basically, since you do mention respect and civilization, it goes both ways. It's not fun for you to have employees who don't respect you (by your skewed defition that involves suits.) Well, conversely, it's no fun for me to work for someone who doesn't respect his employees.
"The thing is, I can have both."
The thing is, everyone thinks they do. Yet 3 in 4 programmers can't actually program, and about 68% don't even know the basics of the language they're paid to program in. Someone must hire those, eh?
The hiring process industry-wide is just sick and non-functional. It's not just riddled with bullshit criteria (e.g., suits), and "please demonstrate your talent and inclination at bulshitting me creatively" kinds of bullshit questions (e.g., "what's your biggest deffect?"), it also most of the time doesn't even try to prove the important part: skill. Most people make it at best a bullshitting contest, where the one who can lie with a straight face gets the job.
"Two employees, virtually equal, one wearing a suit, one not, guess which will get hired 99% of the time?"
That's just the symptom of the bullshit hiring process I've described above. If you routinely end up with people that equal that you can just pick the nicest suit, you've probably not even tried to assess their skills. That, or had noone above entry-level skill interested in that job to start with.
"See, I can have a person who does great work, does a quality job, is well-rounded, and respects his/her job."
None of which involves putting up a show business for the PHB. Most people in the department I work for do a thoroughly great job, are well rounded in the way of _real_ skills (e.g., actually understanding a business process does more for their work than merely wearing a business suit does), and respect their job (at least in the sense of doing it professionally and well.) Funny how none of them need a suit for that.
Well, actually a couple of guys do occasionally wear a suit, but I can't say I've noticed their work's quality going up or down when they do it.
I figured it's a different topic, so I've split it into a different message. You say:
"You can be honest and give someone a survey with no benefit to them and you'll get mostly honest answers back."
Actually, anthropology studies say people will lie like there's no tomorrow in surveys.
Or let me rephrase that: they won't consciously "lie". They'll subconsciously skew their answers towards those they consider "right".
See, each of us likes to think he/she/it is a better person. In fact, we actually honestly believe we _are_ better than we are. (E.g., if you ask a bunch of Christians, _noone_ thinks they're personally among those going to Hell.) We think we're more moral, better workers, and more socially acceptable to boot.
So any answers in a survey will reflect that idealized self-perception, rather than reality.
E.g., if a community's ideology is that everyone is helping each others, the results you'll get in a survey will illustrate that. Yeah, we all work our fields together, help build each other's house, etc. Even if in reality the last time anyone helped another build a house was in '47 or so.
E.g., if a tribe's culture values hunters and warriors more than anything else, everyone will declare themselves a warrior and hunter in a survey. Even if 90% of their food actually comes from agriculture, and half the rest is imported.
"There's a really simple way to make sure that you get fairly accurate results on surveys or market research... don't offer incentives. People will lie their asses off to get free stuff."
Well, that's very insightful, but that's the problem. Their own incentive and free stuff may still exist anyway. Self-respect is a very valuable thing to get as "free stuff" there.
Plus there also is the factor of picking the answers that you think will please the guy/gal doing the survey. We're social beings and most of people have been educated to "be nice".
Drug testing is based on the assumption that you're dealing with a human kind of biology. That's what they're testing. It's not like you have a major biological difference between those who opt to take part, and those who don't.
And if someone did discover that, say, the resistance in antibiotics is higher in those who take part in drug trials than in those who don't, that would indeed be reason enough to doubt that testing.
That's the whole point: for your results to be any use, the sample you use and the data you collect has got to be representative. A sample and a data set that are massively skewed, becomes of very limited use and credibility.
So let's get back to this particular research.
1. The data itself may be skewed, if you let people decide which data they submit.
Some data is considered confidential, and rightfully so. E.g., I'd rather not do my bank transactions through some fly-by-night company's proxies. (Same applies to your drug testing surveys: if your survey relied on people giving you their banking data, you can bet that you'd get lies.)
Some data carries a certain stigma. E.g., if I were to buy a subscription to a paid porn site, I probably wouldn't want someone collecting _that_ data about me.
2. There's also no indication that the sample is actually representative for anything.
E.g., in your drug testing research, if you're testing a drug that acts on the prostate, you'll want at least some of your test subjects to actually have one. If you're testing a contraceptive pill for women, you'll want at least some of your test subjects to have a womb and ovaries.
If there is strong indication that your sample is in fact not representative at all for what you're trying to study, then the relevance of the result is at best questionable.
It's not really about the stance on spyware, but about the validity of their market statistics.
E.g., if you exclude all Mac users, you'll get the very clear (but very false) image that there is exactly zero market for Tiger or for anything Mac-related.
E.g., if you base your sample on people who took it for the free anti-virus, surprise, your statistics will say that noone buys anti-viruses.
So that's the problem and the question: is such a skewed sample even capable of producing meaningful results?
"If you own a company you can have your employees wear whatever you want. If you don't own the company you work at, then you can wear what they tell you to wear, and you're free to moan on the Internet."
No, I can also find another job, for someone who doesn't get ego-trips from pretending he's god. It may come as a surprise to your ego, but you're not _that_ important.
Even with the job market depression, there still _is_ plenty of market for people who actually have skills. So if you treat people badly, the ones who _can_ find a better job, _will_ find a better job. The ones whose _only_ skill is sucking up to a retard are the ones you're very quickly left with.
So basically, if you own a company, you can choose to pay for skills, or you can choose to pay a bunch of sad monkeys to play along in your ego-trip shows. Sure, it's your decision. If you own the company, by all means, you're free to take the idiotic choice. But it doesn't mean I have to respect someone's taking stupid decisions.
"I don't see what people have against suits. They look and feel good."
Actually, it's not about suits as such, it's about form-over-substance and PHB attitudes.
If you're the kind of "I'm god and can make you wear a chastity belt if I want to" PHB, I don't want to work for you. That job will be more stress than it's worth it.
If you're the kind that hires any monkey based on suit, rather than skill, chances are I won't like working for you. I'd be stuck with a huge team of co-workers who can't even tie their shoelaces, and get more bogged down in getting their buggy crap to run than in actually doing my job.
"I think it comes from the general anti-social attitude of the geeks on this website, they probably grew up with parents who didn't discipline them properly, let them sit at the computer for 16 hours a day, never taught them any manners or social graces."
Ah, the poor-man's attempt at psychology. Here's a free hint: leave that to people who are qualified. Pretending to be some expert in things you obviously don't even understand, is _the_ management fuck-up that I respect the _least_. It just makes you look like a PHB.
But to humour you, my parents were actually very strict. They didn't even leave me much time for the computer, or much else. They also did teach me respect for competence, taking pride in a work well done, basing one's self-respect on actual achievements rather than being the popular sheep in a crowd, and that critically thinking for oneself is good.
Which in the end is what this is all about. I _can_ and _do_ respect genuine competence, including in management or anything else. I am thoroughly disgusted by sad clowns who do their job badly. Including, again, in management.
"This means they naturally rebel against civilised behaviour, such as wearing correct business attire."
There is nothing "correct" or "incorrect" about it as such. It's just a social ritual, nothing more.
So the question is whether you want to pay for rituals (including suits, verbal masturbation meetings, etc) or for getting the job done. If you want rituals, sure, feel free to pay for rituals. But then you've just told me that you're incompetent at doing your real job, and mis-use corporate funds for your little ritual entertainment.
So, see above: I don't respect incompetence.
Has it ever occured to you that management is all about managing resources? Including _human_ resources?
E.g., that if it were a construction company, they have different jobs that require different skills? Some people are good at driving a bulldozer, some are in charge of purchasing materials, some are qualified to operate a crane, some do the accounting, some are marketting, etc. No sane company would expect the crane driver to also be a marketting guy and a lawyer and...
No, neither of them is irreplaceable, but the manager's job is nevertheless to hire the right ones. You need to hire a crane guy _and_ an accountant _and_ some truck drivers _and_ some guys who actually lay bricks _and_ an electrician or two, etc. You need all the right pieces to fill in the puzzle.
That's what a manager's job is about. Believe it or not, you're there to do that job, not just to pretend you're some royalty.
Yet here you are demanding that _everyone_ be good both at "representing your group" and "giving public speeches" _and_ at getting the work done. That your engineers and marketters are some interchangeable resource, and everyone must work equally well in two very unrelated roles.
Do you even pay well enough to actually get the few people who actually mastered two unrelated skills? People who are actually _good_ at two unrelated skills cost more than those who are good at one. It's like asking for someone who's both an painter and a good music composer: they exist, but are few and far in between. Expect to pay a premium to actually get one, much less a whole team.
So again, the manager's job is to find out how many of each you need. Demanding that everyone has all possible skills isn't even economically viable.
So you're telling me... what? That instead of X people who are good at marketting, and Y people who are good at engineering, you have (X+Y) who are piss-poor at both? They're not even good marketters, if all you judged is their suit. And you definitely didn't even try to sort them by engineering skills, if in your world everyone works interchangeably.
Heh.
"Will I feel akward having this person give a public speech? Will I feel weird standing next to this person at a trade conference?"
Ah, insecurity.
Here's just an idea for you: some of us take pride, and base our self-esteem, on our _skills_, not our suits. While you're telling me that your version doesn't even just depend on _your_ suit, but on being in the right looking group of suits? Geesh, talk about an insecure lemming.
"There are dozens of people like you. You are interchangeable. You probably aren't especially well qualified for the job over anyone else."
If you only hire incompetents in suits, I'm not surprised noone in your team was ever more qualified at any job than anyone else. There is just one point were that kind of uniformity exists, and that is the point of _zero_ competence. (Or close enough.)
The farther you move from that point, the bigger a variety you get in the N-dimensional space of skills. You start getting people who are good at marketting, but bad at engineering, or viceversa. You start getting people who can program Java very well, but don't even understand the bare basics of Unix administration, or viceversa. Etc.
Well, here are a few ideas:
1. Information Roadblocks. The reason some managers take stupid decisions, is that some other managers below them are yes-men. A decision is only as good as the information it's based on, which includes the feedback from previous decisions. If the feedback only consists of "yes, sir" and "great idea, sir", well expect not just a slippery slope, but a steep one.
He/she/it just has nothing to balance the PR and marketting bullshit he's fed. The nice marketting guy, sure, comes and says that the new Snake Oil (TM) Enterprise Edition framework is the greatest thing since the wheel, it will solve world hunger, aids, and make any project take 21 days including testing. There are people much lower who know this is bull or unapplicable to their project, but the information from them has disappeared along the chain of command.
2. Ass Covering. Taking some stupid decision that just follows some stupid guideline is safe. At worst there'll be some corporate meetings whether to change the guideline, but you are safe.
3. Its variant: stupid is good. Taking a decision based on exact numbers and calculations is something that can be attacked. Taking a decision purely based on fuzzy buzzwords is safe.
Take stuff like "scalable" (even if it means "you can use a mainframe to get the same speed as other products get on a 486"), "industry standard" (usually meaning "no actual ISO/ECMA/whatever standard, but whatever wantonly changing format/API/whatever we jokingly call a standard"), "lower TCO" (compared to building a pyramid and carving your data on its walls), "synergy" (if you buy our hardware and our software, you'll also need our expensive consultants to make it work, which is a good synergystic effect for _us_), etc. How can you disprove something like "scalable", when basically _any_ program ever written scales with a bigger computer, and _any_ web application scales with a load balancer?
4. Ego trips. (Those unwashed peons have no business imagining they can question my god-like perfection. Of course my decisions are nothing short of perfect, because I'm the boss.)
5. Much to the same effect, but different disease: insecurity. (Maybe if I ask those developpers what that means they'll think I'm stupid. Let's read some buzzwords from some IT-for-managers ragazine and pretend I'm some guru by throwing around technical-sounding babble. Better yet, let's take decisions based on some ad disguised as an article, written by some paid shill who never actually used that technology.)
6. Last, but probably most important: we software developpers are notoriously bad at explaining things. We get bogged in religious details like RISC-vs-CISC, big-vs-little endian, emacs-vs-vi, BSD-vs-Linux (Linux-vs-Windows is old hat already for some co-workers), Eclipse-vs-Netbeans, etc, and fail to properly address the _real_ things that interest a manager. For him the program runs just as well on RISC or on CISC, on Linux or Windows or BSD, and the important thing is "how much will it cost?"
We also tend to complain lots, and the above arguing about details also is perceived as complaining about anything. And again, we fail to explain _why_ and _how_ that detail affects the bottom line. A lot of managers are left with the impression that "bah, no matter what you buy, they'll complain anyway. So I might as well buy whatever looks better to me."
"Why blow money on both Zeldas if you don't like 'em?"
:)
In my case, out of curiosity, and because I could easily afford it. I buy lots and lots of games anyway. I have 3 bookcases literally _full_ with just the games I bought since 1999. Literally. I'm a games addict. I play some 60-70 hours a week. I need lots of games for that.
Anyway, some people seemed to like the Zeldas, so, hey, I wanted to give them a try. Can't know if you like it until you try it, right? Turns out I didn't like them at all, but hey.
Still, it wasn't a complete loss. Both my old parents liked at least Mario 64 and Donkey Kong 64, so at least that was some use out of my N64. Haven't gotten them to play the Zeldas, though, but can't win 'em all
"If you like your ultra blocky "realistic" games then good for you."
Actually, I've been known to argue against "realism" if it gets in the way of gameplay. And most of the time it does. So I can see your point. Most of the times games who claim to be "realistic" just use that as an excuse for bad game design.
Personally I'm into the gameplay and story part of it. Obviously, though, my idea of what's good gameplay differs from yours. But I like to think that that's just normal.
"There are a lot of people (not all) who claim that your Marios' and Sonic type games are boring so that they look cool"
I'm not even sure in what adult circles it's considered cool to be a gaming nerd. Adults like to pretend that gaming is for kids, and that they themselves have a life. That's the real way to be "cool".
"Why blow $20-$50 on something that is just not "sophisticated enough"and grownup enough?"
Have you considered that a lot of people do have kids or a spouse? Tastes aren't uniform within a family, you know.
E.g., my father is the ultra-competitive type, so he plays Counter-Strike. His idea of fun is showing everyone that he's the greatest in every single way.
My mother plays generally simple things along the lines of tetris. According to her, it's because she can use only reflexes and still think of whatever she wants to think about.
So in that family you'd already find two very different groups of games on the sheves. And it was even more diverse than that back when me and my brother lived there.
Probably the biggest advantage is that it's cheaper. (Although if by much, that remains to be seen.)
Plus, AMD's promise was something like being able to double the number of CPUs without having to buy a new motherboard. Though how much saving that will be (I expect AMD to price these pretty high), and whether it will mean that you're stuck with much slower cores to keep the TDP limits, that remains to be seen.
There are other possibilities for improvement, such as using a shared cache and IMC instead of just throwing two cores together and going over HT like on a dual CPU system. But AMD hasn't yet done that.
"When I was a kid. I never understood why grownups stopped watching cartoons."
Well, I never did stop.
"Who wants to sneak around with a square head with a "Realistic" face painted on?"
I don't. I pick games where that doesn't happen.
"Who wants to fall asleep while playing a game with a depressing and slow storyline?"
I don't. I look for games with an interesting story that keeps me interested until the end. Any other questions?
"Kiddy or not, I have fun."
Bingo. So do I. Just not with the same games.
"I never wanted to grow up to be some boring fella who could only find enjoyment in boringness."
Well, here's the thing you can't seem to get into your head: some of us don't find those other genres boring at all. Some of those games I've used as examples count on _my_ scale, around the point of "most fun one can have with the clothes on." And conversely, we too find _your_ favourites to be the epitome of boring brain-damage.
(Which is actually the whole point of why Nintendo loses market share: you can't just tell people to stop liking something and start liking something else. They keep giving me only stuff I find boring, I won't buy it.)
E.g., as I've said before, I actually went and bought both N64 Zeldas. I was bored out of my skull in 10 minutes flat. I still remember how idiotic, pointless and boring I found it in Ocarina Of Time to jump around on stuff, using flowers as propellers. Or take Mario 64 or Donkey Kong 64. WTF is supposed to be fun about pointlessly jumping on stuff like a retard? I got bored stiff in minutes. Etc.
The difference is that I can understand that different people have different tastes: what's fun for me might be boring for you, and viceversa. It's just normal. I'm not telling you that your tastes are boring and wrong because they don't match mine. While you seem stuck in the notion that only your tastes are right, and you can just proclaim everyone else's tastes wrong.
Which is like if I came saying that everyone should like the taste of milk (because I do) and hate apples (because I do). I mean, hey, everyone must have the same tastes I have right? Nobody can possibly actually like apples, or be lactose intollerant, right? I like to think you can see what's wrong with that kind of a notion.
"At least with Zelda I can tell my actual playing ability is getting better, whereas with Final Fantasy, you just have to chalk-up more hours to get your character stronger, so that they cause more damage, and have a better hit percentage."
In other words, Zelda has totally different gameplay, a totally different game system, and totally different mechanics. I.e., for all practical purposes it's a completely different genre.
I'm not saying one genre is better than the other or anything. It would be as stupid as arguing whether RTS is better than FPS: if someone wants a FPS and hates RTS, there's no way a RTS will be a substitute for his favourte genre. And same here, for someone who actually wanted to play FF, Zelda is _not_ a substitute.
Thank you, you've just made my point for me.
"Of course, as soon as Square started making Final Fantasy for the Playstation, the Final Fanstasy series lost its appeal."
For you, maybe. For others, FF7 sold more Playstations than Sony's marketting and all Sony games combined. Probably half the Playstations ever sold were sold because of Square.
So as I've said in the beginning: don't assume that everyone has the same tastes you do. If you fall in Nintendo's target niche, good for you. But there's also a lot of us who'll gladly take "watching 5 minutes cutscenes" over pointlessly jumping on stuff any day. That's all I'm saying: not everyone is you.
As for RPGs, well, the PC indeed had some good ones, but they were few and far in between, back in the day of the PSX-vs-N64. Sure, you had some gems like Fallout 1 and 2 or Baldur's Gate or Planescape Torment. (KOTOR and Morrowind came _much_ later.) But that meant something like 1 good RPG per year.
By contrast, the PSX had a couple dozens per year. You can probably see how even for us PC RPG gamers the Playstation was a very tempting proposition. And how the N64 was just not a contender for that market segment.
But PC gaming was also always a niche market itself, compared to the larger and more lucrative console market. Don't get me wrong, the PC has some great games, but the cost of hardware to run them well has always been an issue. Back then, even more: a high-end PC used to cost some 2000 dollars, a console was 300 dollars. So more people had a console than a PC.
So there IMHO was (and still is) a whole market who really just faced the choice "do I get a Nintendo or a Sony", and the PC was a non-factor. And there it boils down to "which of those has games that match my personal preferences."
Nintendo painted itself into a corner by cattering to just a niche. There were a lot of genres which just were not available at all on a N64. So fans of those genres really had no reason whatsoever to buy a N64 or Nintendo's games.
(Incidentally, yep, it's very insightful that you mention Sega there. One of the main complaints about the Dreamcast was the same: whole genres were missing. Heck, I was a Sega fanboy, and even I was irked that you couldn't find a good Dreamcast RPG for love or money for the first two years or so.)
Plus Nintendo's flogging the dead horse that games are only for kids was a bad maneuver. I'm not saying that they shouldn't have made games for kids too. But focusing _only_ on that corporate image drove away the lucrative market of adult gamers. Bad move: even for kids, it's the parents that pay for the console. Sony bet on having games that Mom and Dad too can play, and it paid off.
Basically I'm saying that it wasn't just a question of pumping money into something. It was a question of making it useful for more people.
Sure, the PS2 had bad load times and its graphics indeed didn't really live up to the hype. But whatever genre you preferred, you could find one on the PS2. On the other hand, most genres weren't available for love or money on a GameCube.
Basically it's the difference between "overrated" and "useless". Sure, the PS2 can be filed under "overrated", but for anyone falling outside of Nintendo's target niche the N64 or GameCube fell squarely under "useless". That's what really made the difference, IMHO. If that's the choice, I'd rather buy something overrated than something useless for me.
I'm not sure exactly what deal was there between Sony and Square. All that mattered as a gamer was that suddenly the good games (for my taste) were on the Playstation, whereas the N64 had zero games I was interested in.
/. wouldn't forget this easily the way Nintendo tried to bully developpers into submission, and tried to enforce contracts that basically said "If you want to make games for our console, you peon, sign here that you're never ever allowed to make games for any other system.")
However, I do know that:
- a lot of other developpers just preferred the Playstation. I don't think Sony paid them all off.
- Making games for the Playstation was more profitable. Nintendo has a long history of trying to make others foot the bill. E.g., see how once they tried to announce a GameCube price cut to a level barely above what the retailers paid to Nintendo for it. Basically trying via hype to make the retailers take all the price cut, to help sell Nintendo's crap.
In the case of developpers, developping for Nintendo's cartridge format didn't leave you with much money out of selling those games. That went a long way to convince developpers jump ship to Sony.
- Nintendo's snotty attitude did not help, either. Nintendo still hadn't gotten past it's SNES times ego trip.
(You'd think that the anti-monopoly gang on
Nintendo didn't even try to meet those third party developpers half way, or at least listen. The attitude was "Fuck, you. We're the Big N, you're the peon. You're the one who'll be sorry you left."
If you think you can live off selling games for a console whose market share is shrinking fast, tell that to Sega. They were at that point once too: all Dreamcast owners were happily buying Sega's games, but not many people were actually buying a new Dreamcast unless Sega gave it away almost for free. (Partially _because_ of lack of 3rd party support and whole genres being completely absent until the last few months.)
Ask them how well their Dreamcast did in that situation. Oh, wait, it didn't. Sega dropped the Dreamcast and exitted the console market completely.
Nintendo isn't as profitable as you think in the non-portable console market. Most of their money comes from the lucrative gameboy market, where, surprise, they do have 3rd party support. So if your big hopes for Nintendo include screwing up in that market too, by driving away the developpers, you might just see Nintendo go the way of Sega.
See, 3rd party support isn't that bad a thing as you assume. Those 3rd party developpers for Sony and MS actually have a positive effect on Sony's or MS's income:
1. Sony _does_ make some money (and in fact good money) out of each game sold for their system, even if it's from a third party developper. In case you wondered why a new PS2 game costs more than a new PC game, that's why: that difference goes directly into Sony's bank account. And
2. More titles means more people buying their consoles, which means more people buying the games, _and_ more games they can sell to each PS2 owner. Which drives up the income from the previous paragraph pretty much quadratically.
The reason Nintendo did well was basically that they sell cheap stuff, _not_ that it's so profitable to lack 3rd party support. Their consoles have the cheapest hardware of all contenders, and their games have two digit polygon counts. That's cheap to make, so you need to sell less of them to make a profit.
But if their market share shrinks far enough, even that may well become non-profitable.