1. So, you think that those men with property didn't vote for their own personal gain? I wonder where, say, those slavery laws came from. Right, from rich men trying to make it easier for them to oppress other humans.
The sad thing is, there is no limit at which you had enough and you start working (or voting) just for the common good. The brain doesn't even see absolute values, it sees deltas. Your happiness or unhappiness have more to do with how much better or worse you are than yesterday, than with exactly where you are. So someone who has 1$ wants to have $2, someone who has $1000 want to have $2000, but someone who has a billion will need to get two billions to get the same shot of "I'm happy" chemical signals in the brain.
So basically if you think that, "Voting has become the enabling mechanism for thieves to ply their craft"... well, then it always was. That discrimination just divided the class into already successful thieves, and a mass of victims to ply their craft on. The former voted to rob the latter.
2. So what was the improvement compared to medieval aristocracy? You still had a rich class who are supposedly smart enough to decide for everyone else, and a poor class who should shut up and do what they're told. And the former use that mechanism to exploit and plunder the latter.
What's the difference? That the rich get to elect a president? Well, that's how it worked for the HRE, medieval Poland, and a bunch of other places. Heck, medieval Poland was then actually more democratic, because everyone who ever had a noble as an ancestor could vote, so actually even some of the poor got to vote. That the rich also get a say in which laws they get? Again, see the HRE.
I thought that the whole idea of democracy was that the _people_ are in charge. You know, what with even its name being a combination of "demos"=people and "kratos"=rule or power.
3. You know, I wish you guys would find a better fallacy than the theft to justify your greed with. The moment you can function just as well on your own, without the rest of society, _then_ you can say with a straight face that it's 100% your money and anyone having any demands is a thief.
But the fact is, society works as a whole, and money is just a convenient abstraction for how we divde the cake we _all_ helped make. So somehow you think you're that important that you're entitled to a disproportionately larger slice, for the same number of hours worked. And woe if someone doesn't let you loot and plunder the pie as you see fit, at other people's disadvantage, 'cause then that's stealing.
You wouldn't have your job or your standard of living without at least a thousand or so other people working on making that shit you use as status symbols. And if we're talking taxes, your company _and_ its clients wouldn't be anywhere near where they are without the infrastructure built with those taxes. Without the roads to transport the raw materials, or the pool of educated potential clerks and researchers, or a pool of qualified unemployed people to absorb the shocks and bursts, or a gazillion other things, you'd be right back to the 19'th century standard of living.
So you're telling me, what? That all those should happen without you having to pay your share? Who's going to pay for it then? Oh, right, I forgot, you wanted to take the poors' right to vote, so you can plunder _them_.
I'm sorry, but that's not a God-given right, that's a parasitic attitude. Yes, you can pack it in some pretense that if someone doesn't let you take half a poor guy's slice too, it's theft, but it doesn't change the aspect: it's all bullshit rethoric for "I want half of those people's slices too." That's what being a parasite is all about.
Well, if you're going to take it that literally, I guess not many things make sense to you.
1. We're talking about frogs, not bacteria. You know, a lot more complex stuff, where evolution happens a lot slower.
2. I never mentioned a start and a stop. That's your own strawman. But in a lot of these situations, yes, you could put such goalposts anyway. How about: from where we started changing their environment (e.g., turning a lake anoxic) to when they can actually survive there. If the second doesn't happen within a given time from the first, they're dead. That's your "start" and "stop" in that race.
3. I'm talking enough evolution to deal with radically different conditions, not about the minor mutations every birth has.
But on the whole, I'm under the impressions that you were just looking for some detail to take out of context, deliberately misunderstand, spout some irrelevat truisms, and get the ego-boost of "omg, I found someomne I could sound smart to." Well, I could put it nastier, but let's just put it like this: if your dose of ego-masturbation is to try to put someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know where you are in relation to that bottom of the barrel. Nothing I could say probably can make it any worse.
If you don't have damn good DNA repair mechanisms, different cells in your body change randomly to do different things than what's needed, and you die. (E.g., of cancer.) So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. Heck, even small-ish evolutions in tens of thousands of years are called accelerated evolution.
We're talking about "since 1970" here, which isn't even a blip at evolution scales. _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
2. Evolution really works like in the joke about the guys camping, and one of the guys putting on his sports shoes when they see a pissed off tiger: you don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy. You don't have to be the fastest gazelle, you just have to outrun the slowest when the lions drop by.
What I'm indirectly getting at is that it worked in situations where there was a slow changing equilibrium between hunter and prey, or between species and environment. On the whole, the species still has to be survivable in the short run. It doesn't work for "bang, you're dead!" situations. And normally they do get that short term survivability. Even a species whose become relatively unfit, gets breaks as its lowering numbers also causes the predator population to drop, and buys the prey some more time. Or viceversa, a relatively unfit predator gets a break as the prey over-multiplies and eventually it gets enough of a meal even from sick prey or corpses.
The natural selection will then keep culling from the lower end, and over millions of years, the species gets better.
No species can evolve into something better if you keep hunting it into extinction within decades, or dump poison into its water, or cut down its habitat and replace it with a parking lot. Or if you keep hunting it past the point where predator-prey equilibrium would have allowed it to rebound, that's it, really. Game over.
3. While I sorta see your point about climate change,
A) it doesn't apply for situations when we pollute a place overnight, or when we cause an eutrophication and the algae bloom suffocates everything else
B) you also have to remember that climate change is a bit over-sold these days. It's the #1 best selling sin, and _everything_ gets blamed on it first. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that it does get blamed for more than it actually caused.
In this case, we don't _know_ whether these frogs died because of climate change or, say, because of pollution. As more and more third world and developing countries industrialize, they pollute more and more. And again, let's not forget that while the carbon cult is obsessed with CO2 only, early unregulated industry puts out a lot more immediately poisonous stuff. Both in the air _and_ in the water, which, as mentioned, is the amphibians' problem: they depend on both.
Seriously, half the world still doesn't have any filters on their factories, or any other environment protection, or still uses lead in its pipes and gasoline. You start worrying about the quality of air when you already have other more stringent QOL components covered. When you're dirt poor, you care more about getting food, clean water, medicine, and a job. As long as even those are hit and miss, or in a lot of places more miss than hit, you don't give a fuck about that factory dumping toxic stuff into the air or water. Lead in the air (e.g., from leaded gasoline) might affect you later, while lack of food will kill you right now.
As little as a new factory starting production, can poison the water of several species over night. Sure, someone out there will scream about all the CO2 from it, as if that were all that could possibly ever matter, and in the long run maybe it even is, but it will be the other chemicals that kill in the short run. Or if that factory produces fertilizers, again, you _could_ worry about the CO2 it produces, but that's an eutrophication event waiting to happen,
Well, don't get me wrong, it was a good game... with a crap interface. Personally I just went physical combat all the way, so at least I don't have to deal with the spell silliness.
1. Well, it was on the PC, so it was mouse and keyboard.
2. Now if only someone could have invented... I don't know... some kind of a row of icons on the screen to remind me which number is assigned to which spell. Oh, wait, it's called a toolbar and pretty much all games _except_ Oblivion have one.
And what if it wouldn't need me to lift my hand off the movement keys -- since I play with the numeric gamepad, not WASD -- and move them all the way across the keyboard to hit those numbers and then back. It actually was less of a pain to do the sequence I described.
Seriously, I didn't like the Oblivion interface at all.
Well, I know about the usual modding capabilities, but it's not moddable yet. I have to wonder how long it will take. It's entirely possible to get the CS in January, if someone from marketing doesn't want their game re-rated AO because of mods before christmas. (AO = no shelf space at Wall-Mart.) It remains to be seen.
Well, if I want to be pessimistic, I'd say that I thought the same about Mass Effect too. I mean, it's from the guys who made Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2! Surely it's just a matter of time until they let us mod it. Turns out it wasn't just lacking modding tools, but was also saddled with a DRM that craps out if you touch any of the resource files at all. I.e., it was even less moddable than KOTOR, which at least could be modded with some modified NWN tools. Fuckers.
At any rate, as long as that's not yet available, well, I'll judge the game by how it is now, not by how it might be at some undefined time in the future:P
Actually, tbh I found it a lot less console-y than Oblivion.
In Oblivion, my main problem with the console interface was magic. It just didn't work. To do any kind of spell switching -- and you had to do that all the time, e.g., between attack spells, shielding yourself, and healing spells -- you had to switch to the menu, scroll through an ever growing list of spells (IIRC there was no way to delete old ones), "equip" the other spell, switch back, cast it, etc. More pain in the rear than it's worth. The key combos to do any of the special attacks or defenses (e.g., dodge was jump then block), also felt a lot more like a hack and slash platformer than a proper RPG.
I find that by contrast the Fallout 3 interface just works. It's maybe not perfect, but it's perfectly palatable as a FPS/RPG interface, and doesn't break immersion all the time.
Actually, I do remember a piece of news from a while ago. Apparently the chinese deorbit their craft to hit their own territory, not the ocean. And one managed to hit a house and cave in the roof, even though it wasn't aimed at a densely populated area or anything.
The peasant was quoted as saying something like, well, maybe it brings good luck or something.
Well, I guess, on the bright side, IIRC feng-shui means something like "wind and water", and without a roof he'll surely get more of both;)
1. Well, yes, every _other_ weapon in Fallout 2 was fictional, but only every other.
So it's somewhat inexact to say that it "everything was "10mm pistol", "assault rifle", "sniper rifle" and so on."
2. Fallout Tactics was from Interplay too, so it is just as canon. Much as I understand why many fans of 1 and 2 like to ignore that it existed. There it went even heavier into RL weapon names.
3. Well, it's not like I'm going to lead a mob with torches and pitchforks over that issue, but it seems to me that between
A) naming the drugs according to Fallout canon, and
B) debatably breaking the canon with regard to guns,
the latter is more worthy of bithching. Or rather, the former is _less_ worthy of bitching. I'm not going to lose much sleep over the latter either, but the former... I don't even understand what the fuss is about. So they named the drugs like in Fallout 1 and 2. Wtf is there to protest about that? It's like protesting that Oblivion has daedric equipment.
1. As a Fallout geek, I don't even understand the fuss. The drugs in Fallout 1 and 2 were already called stuff like Buffout, Jet, etc. So, lore-wise, it's a change for the better.
I mean, sure, I could live with a name like "Morphine" too, but I see no reason to run amok about their respecting the canon either. It's Fallout, people. Getting upset that the drugs in the Fallout universe have Fallout names, is a bit as silly as getting upset that a LOTR game has mithril. Sure, you could call it "titanium" instead of "mithril", but it won't actually make the game better. It's the canon for that world, silly.
2. If I were to bitch about a name change there, I'd rather bitch about the weapon names. Fallout always had real weapon names, like the G11 or AK-47 or FN-FAL or whatnot. Now suddenly we have non-descript stuff like "chinese pistol" and "chinese assault-rifle." WTF?
3. In fact, I wonder if the whole "let's name the drugs RL names" thing was just a PR stunt to cause a lot of talk.
I mean, if you look at the whole thing, it is schizophrenic to the extreme. The weapons get changed to non-RL names, the canon be damned, _but_ at the same time they supposedly really wanted to change canon-correct drug names to stuff like "Morphine". It makes no sense. There is no coherent plan in there.
My guess is that they never actually planned to release it with RL drug names, and just pulled a PR coup to get a lot of talk about their game. I.e., that this isn't as much a censorship story, but really a story about PR bullshit.
Actually, if you've looked at enough game forums, you'll see lots of bans which are for stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with being uncivilized.
There are whole companies where they delete posts, and even ban accounts for stuff like reporting or discussing bugs. And I don't mean the "you gay motherfuckers get off your lazy arses and fix my pet peeve right now" kind of "discussion", but even mentioning that some exploits exist at all, or that some DRM bug has prevented someone from starting the game. Especially if someone from Marketing got ideas like, "omg, if people find out we have bugs or multiplayer exploits, our sales will drop, and we can't have that before Christmas." But whatever the reason, trying to prevent people from posting bugs, especially if a bug has showed up already too often on the forum, _is_ a pretty popular way to avoid fixing them.
Heck, Sony even had a sandbox for new forum users (which included veterans finally activating their forum account), just so they can't complain about the NGE in SWG. Apparently enough people activated their forum account just to say a final "good bye, but this is no longer fun" when unsubscribing, and we can't have that, can we?
I also remember forum bans and account bans for as little as distasteful fanfic about someone's game. But it wasn't in the game, and it wasn't even on the game's forums. Just, you know, if you dare post something we dislike about our games, we'll kick you out.
So I'm really not looking forward for more of that dictatorial accounts. If someone actually cheated in a multiplayer game or anything, fine, ban them. But not for offending an already arbitrary forum moderation system.
And how does a Spore ban (since they used that particular example) even fit that picture? Even EA marketed Spore as a "massively single-player game". Let's say I was a forum troll. So exactly how's my temper going to affect someone else's game? Can I even get into anyone's game to spew obscenities at them? Or what?
Plus, here's another idea: it seems to me like if you have a player rebellion on your hands, on the forums or in game or otherwise, the best policy is to be open and fair. People don't run amok about a bug when they know it'll get put in the queue and looked at later. You might get one, though, if it becomes obvious that you use PR bullshit and deleting bug reports, instead of fixing very real problems and exploits. They don't run amok about some griefer being banned, especially if again you're open as to why and what the rules are. You get a virtual rebellion when you're acting like an ass to the customers in the first place.
Adding a game ban there just adds injury to the already existing insult.
Well, then let me be the one who says it. Deus Ex was a mix of FPS, RPG, Stealth, etc, elements, and it was quite easy to be disappointed, if you liked one and hated the others. Sorta like chocolate filled with cherry liqueur doesn't necessarily appeal to everyone who likes chocolate, fruit or booze, but rather to an intersection. There'll be plenty of people who still won't find it a substitute for fresh fruit, for example.
And yes, it had multiple ways of solving everything, but not all ways of solving any particular situation. Regardless of which of the genres they mixed you liked (again, unless you like them all), there's always be some places where your favourite just didn't work at all. And regardless of which you hated, there'd be several places where that was the best or indeed only option that worked.
E.g., their emphasis on stealth was about as much fun as root canal for _me_. I don't buy an RPG to end up playing Solid Snake instead. (Not saying there's anything wrong with you if you like stealth games, btw, just that tastes are subjective and _I_ don't.)
The mistake _some_ people make is to assume that everyone likes the same things they do, hence if you disliked it, you either didn't actually play it or here's a list with what's wrong with you. In reality tastes are subjective, and what you like someone else might hate. And making a hash of half a dozen genres... well, someone who liked them all, will no doubt be in Nirvana. (And I don't mean the band;) I can see how they'd think it's the best thing since sliced bread. But it's really catering to the intersection of the fans of those individual genres, not to the union. Someone like me who likes RPG but hates sneaking, will dislike having that adition shoved down his throat under the "but it's really an RPG" excuse. Someone who likes FPS but hates talking to people or managing skills, will feel cheated by those RPG additions. Etc.
That said, the same applies to some of us who really really liked Fallout 1 and 2 as they were. I really liked having a small army with me, and I really liked the turn based system. It was more like playing chess than like a twitch game. And mashing the pause key (ok, VATS key) doesn't even come close to being the same thing.
Now I _can_ live with it, but mostly because I'm resigned to the idea that thinking games are a dying breed, and the mass of the market is made of various other categories who want to play to relax their brain. Not saying it with contempt or anything, but that's genuinely the impression I'm getting. The same goes for most other genres. There are more people who played, say, the Mech Warrior games because they're cool 3D ego-shooters with big robots, than people who play MegaMek because it's an accurate implementation of BattleTech and needs doing maths with dice and modifiers.
And in the end, what you illustrate there is largely how useless a term "RPG" has become. _Almost_ anything, including far greater deviations than Deus Ex can still be called RPG with a straight face. Did you know that Daikatana claimed to have RPG elements? (And yes, I played that too. To the end. I still have the disk and the manual, come to think of it.) There are people who've claimed that fighting games are RPGs because they have a health bar which is sorta like HP in D&D. There are people who've claimed that the Gran Turismo series, excellent racing simulators as they really are, are RPGs at heart because you can use money to buy upgrades and that's sorta like having xp and levelling up. I'm not making it up.
So saying that Deux Ex or anything else is still an RPG, really doesn't say much at this point. It's only marginally more speciffic than saying that it's a video game.
It's certainly too large a category by now to even say that someone is a fan of the whole sprawling genre, because it really includes stuff ranging from turn-based tactics to RTS to FPS with a little story to God knows what else. It's become so sprawled that it's in the meantime possible to love a subgenre of it, and hate another, although they're both RPGs.
Actually, it seems to me like there is plenty of smoke for which no fire has ever been found, and for which it's been even proven that a fire never existed. And increasingly more there are agencies (e.g., PR agencies) _paid_ to create fake smoke to convince you to buy someone's snake oil. Astroturfing, buzz marketing campaigns, PR campaigns, think-tanks, fake news, FUD campaigns, etc, you name it. There's a whole industry whose job is to make lots of smoke, and hope you're stupid enough to believe that there might be a fire there after all.
In fact, I'd propose that as the mark of the modern-day gullible guy. That innocent belief that there must be some truth in it, or those guys wouldn't say it. Sometimes even to the extent that if it were a lie, surely nobody would be _allowed_ to write it on a web page. Ignoring all the evidence that some people earn their living with selling you lies, half-truths, and stuff that would technically be true except it's handpicked out of context and arranged into pointing in whatever direction they want to point.
What makes something news is the evidence that it indeed happened, not the amount of second-hand smoke that tries to point at a non-existent fire.
Otherwise, if you just go by "there is no smoke without fire", you might as well go help that nigerian widdow get her millions already, since there's plenty of "smoke" by now. There's millions of people who've received emails about it after all. With that much smoke there must be some fire there.
And just for the sake of annoying the local crackpots, there's plenty of smoke about:
- spiritism / magic / paranormal stuff, in spite of a still unclaimed 1 million dollars Randi prize for anyone who can prove having such powers (not to mention Houdini and many others before Randi)
- that some miracle pill having been invented in Russia / China / whatever-far-and-exotic-place that cures all diseases, regardless of whether they're bacterial, fungal, viral, DNA-damage or auto-immune (hint: they're massively different things), and will apparently even grow back your destroyed pancreas, because it cures auto-immune diabetes too! Only some nebulous pharma conspiracy keeps them from talking about it.
- that while millions of doctors and nurses and pharma investors and managers die of cancer every year, all would rather die in horrible pain than admit there's a cure for cancer and use it to save themselves
- spooky mind-probe rays. Where do you think "tin foil hat" came from?
Etc.
All of those exist, and some even make millions for the snake-oil peddlers, because, basically, some people are gullible enough to think there must be a fire there if there's so much smoke.
Actually, the funny thing is that Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 wasn't even supposed to be about technology as such. And the inventor of that buzzword still insists that it isn't, long after the Grinch... err... the marketing bulshitters stole it and ran away with it.
Web 2.0 -- and by contrast Web 1.0 -- wasn't about techno-fetishism, but about techno-utopianism. It has nothing to do with PHP or any other particular technology.
The basic idea of Web 2.0 was that if you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, they're still monkeys. But if you interconnect them and let them write and edit each other's content, now that's teh nirvana and age of enlightenment. Give the users wikis instead of writing your own content. (I'm sure you'll be thrilled to discover that your product was made from baby seals and your CEO blows goats, but, hey, if the users wrote it, it must be true. 'Cause emergent collective intelligence is never wrong;) Have forums. Let the users tag your content instead of categorizing it or any other automated way of finding it. (I'm sure the tags on Slashdot would be sooo much more useful to find an article than full-text search;) Etc.
At a basic level, none of those _really_ needs PHP or JavaScript or anything. You could make a primitive almost-wiki back in the day, by just giving the users FTP access to the site and letting them edit and re-upload the HTML files.
Anyway, in true zealot fashion, where no price is too high for his utopia if someone else pays it, this was packed in a further lie: that, see, that's also the path to making the big bucks and verily everyone will beg to give you their money if you only had a wiki. I guess you can't really preach stuff like, "why you should blow your money to give us our free, collaborative online utopia", so it had to be repacked as, "you could be the next Google if you do!"
No, seriously. If you listen to him, Tim O'Reilly looked at what companies survived the dot-com bubble and what were their defining characteristics. And somehow he managed to completely miss the fact that it's those who had a business plan, silly. E.g., that why Google thrived was because Google became the damn best ad provider. Nah, what he saw is that it was those with wikis, and bittorrent and other collaborative stuff. That's the way to the big bucks.
So he envisioned and preached a DotCom Bubble 2.0... er... Web 2.0 golden age, where everyone has those, and someone gives them money for nothing for doing it.
And 1998 will get its analogy back, when it stops being relevant to the present.
Because for example this (kind of) PR story is just that: "Hey, there's gold in them there (virtual) hills! Get yer gear hear and be the first to stake your claim!" That's it. That's the whole story in a nutshell.
I even propose an empyrical test for detecting such scams: the anecdote of the medieval alchemist who goes to a king and tells him that he's discovered the secret of creating cheap endless gold. And only asks for a bag of gold in return for the secret. So the king gives him an empty bad and tells him something like, "well, you already know how to make gold. Fill it for yourself."
Someone who genuinely knew how to make gold, would just fill the bag for himself. And someone who really thought that the first to open a 3D virtual shop will earn billions, would just do that quietly and hope that the others give him at least a year before they start competing in that space. Or maybe even take some patents and try to prevent the others from competing at all.
But more and more we have the story of someone who believe there's a billion to be made in X, but _you_ should do it, not him. He'll just sell you the gear for it. Hmm.
But that might also be because by age 40 you'd probably have diverted into management if you were no good at coding.
Sadly, I know at least two people who diverted into management, and two more who branched into being a lower paid admin, in spite of being damn good at coding. Just because they got convinced that if they don't give up coding before the 40's they're gonna become teh stupid. The rampant ageism is sad as it is, but seeing it cause self-destructive behaviour like that is just depressing.
Translation: Business has realized the ineffectiveness of trying to do business against giant penis attachment and furry accessories in a world inhabited by idiots.
Real translation: some guy at IBM figured out there's money to be made from those who _haven't_ realized that yet. So, in keeping with the tradition of hyping technologies to people who don't actually need them, next you'll see IBM and a few others pitching something along the lines of WebSphere Virtual World Server 7.1 as the second cumming of Christ. To CIOs whose idea of staying on top of their branch is reading lists of buzzwords, from paid-for-PR articles disguised as technology news.
See, there's this funny thing about gold rushes. Almost invariably the only ones who made money are not the miners. It's those who sold equipment and food to them.
A lot of business in the IT world lately is creating your own fake gold rush by PR, and trying to sell picks to some people who won't strike gold because there is none. And this reads like yet another bubble trying to get started. The message is, basically, "OMG, there's so much money to be made from virtual worlds, and there are all these people who'd take you more seriously and give you more money if they could walk into your 3D virtual shop dressed as a furry. But you have to be careful about what virtual world and business kit you get, you know? Get ours." Have you heard that before? Right. A million times, probably.
E.g., Web 2.0: you'd get so much money and be the only ones profitable online, if you only had forums, and tags, and wikis, and supported BitTorrent. 'Cause it's all about empowering the users, baby. Build a better community web site, and they'll just beg to give you their money. No seriously, that's what the Web 2.0 trademark was supposed to mean. Well, until it was hijacked. There wasn't enough to be sold with that idea, so it got hijacked to mean: buy our funky javascript frameworks and servers, and you'll get everyone wanting to buy stuff from you. People only take an e-commerce site seriously if it has a megabyte of javascript per page, ya know?
E.g., portals. Everything has to be done using portlets, and reinvent in Javascript badly the multiple windows and window management that your OS already had anyway. Customers will only take you seriously and give you lots of money if you buy our portlet server. And here's a few strawmen and non-sequiturs about how if it's done with any different technology, it can't possibly be the view and the information that the customer wants. (Confusing content with a presentation layer technology, basically.)
Etc.
So now the next message and bubble will be: do it with 3D virtual worlds! Buy our virtual shop kit, and this time the customers will really take you seriously! Would we lie to you? Again?
1. If someone habitually takes the wrong decisions, or end up not even bothering to try to get as much needed information as possible, then they _are_ incompetent. No matter whether they're engineers or managers.
Basically, I feel no need to pretend that everyone is special in their own way, and we're all right in different ways. Some people just are incompetent. Yes, that means engineers too. (Or doctors, or anything else.) Sometimes that mechanic bitching about the stupid engineer who designed a bad engine, actually _is_ right. That holds true for other domains too. According to various studies, as much as 2 out of 3 programmers don't even know the language they're paid to program in. I see no reason to assume that managers are all competent either, especially in the face of overwhelming disproof. There too, some are good, some are bad, and some are just bloody stupid.
2. The fact that people will disagree on the details doesn't really say that all are equally right, or anything. A lot of quibbles are about the details, or about changes that should change the overall efficiency by 1%, or about the price you pay for them. That's not the kind of failures I'm concerned with. There _are_ plenty of decisions -- both by engineers and by managers -- which aren't just different ways to solve the same problem, and not just a matter of seeing a bigger picture, and not just a matter of lack of information, but just a matter of plain old stupidity or incompetence. I have no problem with calling it just that.
3. Lack of information is sometimes inevitable (e.g., nobody really knows the fashion of 2010), but a lot of times inexcusable by itself. An engineer who doesn't know something he needs to design a particular engine, well, unless he's doing truly breakthrough stuff and discovering new science, well, why doesn't he know that? There are plenty of books, magazines, or just plain old Google. Ditto for a manager who doesn't know what's going on in his own team.
And there's especially a mode of failure that I won't excuse, I'll actually condemn the most: taking decisions based on just buzzword lists, wishful thinking, or one's own imagination, instead of even trying to get more actual information. There's a medical term for mistaking one's own fantasy for reality: paranoid schizophrenia.
Mostly I'm going to aggree with your main idea, at least at a theoretical level. My point was mostly revolving around the following empyrical observations:
If they combine techincal and leadership they are by far the best.
They _are_ however very different skills, so it's a bit like hoping for someone who is a great archaeologist _and_ a commando trooper. Sure, it worked for Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, but it's more rare IRL. And
There's also the danger of knowing "Just enough to be trouble."
Unfortunately almost every expert promoted to management, ends up gradually slipping back to be that. Just because suddenly they're doing something else instead of keeping honing their skills and learning the new technologies.
A lot of those bosses who know just enough to say something dumb, are someone who was once a genius in COBOL or APL or RPG2, and now can't understand why these Java guys can't do it like in the good old days. They were once on the top of their field. But give them a promotion which no longer requires honing their old skills, and doesn't give them more time to learn new stuff than weekly reading the latest buzzwords off some IT-for-PHBs ragazine, and roll the clock forward 10 years... and they're now that PHB who remembers just little enough to be dangerous.
In fact, since it all started from the Dilbert Principle, if I were to put Dilbert's PHB in one category, he's probably the super-nerd who wrote the company's whole IT system back in the COBOL days.
A complex task is to try stategies like creating a diversion, flanking etc etc. Everyone who thinks they know about war might think these are valid tactics but forget one thing. KISS. Even an attempt at flanking the enemy is FAR to complex to pull off. Sure, it might work once, if you got people who REALLY work together, but 9 times out of 10 it just ends up with the enemy just wiping one part first, then the second.
Before I get started: I _am_ a reserve sergeant, though not that it means much. I also do have a bit of a hobby about history.
So based on that, it seems to me that:
1. Pin-and-flank is the basic maneuver that all armies use and are trained to use nowadays. Ideally, you pin with two units and try to flank with a third. Whether it's at platoon level (pin with 2 squads, flank with a third) or done at whole army level with divisions (pin with 2, flank with the third), you pin and try to flank, while the enemy tries to do the same to you.
And everyone is trained so they do work together. From recruits doing basic drills to military academies training generals, _everyone_ is trained to pin and flank. Any modern war is pins-and-flanks _within_ pins-and-flanks.
2. Any army is not your average PUG (Pick-Up Group) in a MMO, and not even your average guild group. We're talking people who've been drilled into working together until that stuff becomes a reflex and you do it without thinking. When it's your turn to lay the suppression fire while that other guy dashes forward, you don't even think "it's my turn", you just do it.
In fact, _the_ one stat that would be best used to describe any unit in a RL army, wouldn't be "hp" or "dps", but cohesion. An army is only as good as its ability to act together as a single entity. When that breaks down, it wipes out.
It's not even a modern thing. From the Greek phalanx, to the british squares at Waterloo, to any modern war, the unit that stays cohesive a second longer wins. The Phalanx that broke into individual soldiers, got owned. The musket square that lost cohesion, got _rolled_ _over_ by cavalry from a corner. Etc.
So, yes, you _have_ to have people who _really_ work together, or you've lost before you even started. If that group doesn't work together, before the first bullet has been shot, before the artillery duel even started, you've already lost. Heck, if you're even in a situation to wonder, like you do, if the team will actually act together, you have already lost. You just don't know it yet.
3. To get back to flanking, it's again not just modern stuff, it's been a basic thing for millenia. Those cavalry wings ("ala") of a roman legion were there to, at the very least, stop the enemy cavalry from flanking. If a general did nothing smarter at all, he would at the very least try to use his most mobile units to flank. It's been used with chariots, it's been done with cavalry, it's been done with tanks, heck even ship classes have been designed for the sole role of "crossing the T", which was the naval version of flanking.
4. War is complicated shit, and always was complex shit. Again, it's not your average MMO group.
If you look at most known wars from the last few thousand years, they invariably involved more than just rows of soldiers facing each other. There were feints, flankings, ambushes, trops kept in reserve so the enemy would face fresh troops when it's tired, creative use of terrains, etc. Almost invariably the guy who won was the guy who pulled some unexpected stunt and caught the other unprepared. Far larger armies have been wiped by smaller ones whose general pulled some inventive stunt.
The guys who applied the KISS principle... well, the graveyards and historical lists of losers are full of them. 'Nuff said.
Heck, even combined arms tactics, are inherently more complex, but it's what wins wars. The guys who keep it simple, get owned by those who don't. Almost every single time.
Basically: don't judge real wars by the untrained kids who play a MMO. Flanking, cover, complex tactics, etc, don't even work on MMOs, and neither the code nor the design are there to even sense them happening. But they are what wins or loses a real fight.
Well, actually, taking a guess at what period you mean by "as a kid", by your description: nobody wanted to pay for that shuttle.
The original Shuttle concept was a small, reusable craft, mostly for getting a couple of people into orbit, and at most some minimal cargo. It was a space car. Or, ok, maybe pickup truck.
Also, very importantly: only in some orbits. Getting anything in an equatorial LEO is cheap because the Earth's rotation helps you a bit. Getting something in a polar orbit is more expensive. Not only you have to supply the whole orbital speed yourself, you have to _lose_ the speed you started with because of Earth's rotation. Otherwise it would be merely a very inclined orbit, not a polar one.
But what happened was that NASA didn't actually get a budget for it. So they started looking at which other agency they can swindle out of its budget. And there was the Air Force, which used these huge rockets to put spy sats into orbit. And they had a budget for those.
So NASA goes to them and says, basically, "hey, if you give us your lunch money, we can build a reusable launch vehicle for you, and put your sats up there for peanuts ever after. Better yet: we can also go pack one up and bring it down." The Air Force liked both ideas. Lots.
But their spy sats were freaking huge, and they had to go into polar orbits. The Shuttle had to be inflated to accomodate that. Instead of a pickup truck, it became a freakin' huge 18 wheeler truck.
Now funnily enough, this made the Shuttle a failure on both counts:
A) It failed to keep its promise to the Air Force, and those guys still ended up using their own rockets, because the Shuttle was too unreliable and made a trip once in a blue moon. And about bringing them back down, remember that news where they shot one down with a missile shot off a cruiser? Yeah. That's not what NASA had promised them.
B) The original idea was that the space shuttle will be so cheap per launch, that even for TV or telecom sats, it'll be cheaper to just pack it on the shuttle and put it up that way, than use a normal rocket. Even skipping past the unavailability for such things, here's a thought: now it was too big for economics to work that way. If you have a 1 ton sat to put up there, you don't pack it on a 2000 ton shuttle, because just the fuel alone costs more than a traditional rocket. Just as you wouldn't pack it on a 2000 ton truck to ship it across the country. Some jobs _are_ better suited for a small pickup truck, which the shuttle no longer was.
This is one of the reasons, and I know people will cringe when they read this, I actually believe that engineers make the better managers than someone who's just "a manager". When you have someone who has gone through the process and knows what the challenges are, they're going to make better decisions in the long run. If you throw someone with a suit at a project who has little to no technical background you're going to run into the PHB problem.
Actually, from my experience in software, the absolute worst PHB's I've ever seen, were ex-programmers. Some of them _brilliant_ ex-programmers. But they were crap at dealing with people, even worse at organizing things, hated being in meetings half the time now, and most of them also expected their employees to meet and exceed some standards that they themselves actually failed. (Except maybe in their own mind.)
A rough breakdown, off the top of my head, is somewhat like this:
- two ended up obnoxious control freaks, and convinced that nothing ever gets done unless they pester someone to death. One of them used to click on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it loaded pages faster if it knew the boss is watching . (Freaking hillarious or freaking sad, for someone who had been a brilliant programmer before. You decide which.)
- one ended up personally doing the programs of his whole team, because it was less stress than trying to organize and manage that team. He'd make up by lashing out with random acts of mis-management, presumably more to show himself that he's still the boss, than to show it to his underlings.
- two ended up what I can only describe as yes-men in both directions. They basically avoided managing, by pretending to be on everyone's side, both from above and from below.
- one ended up, basically a depressed whiner.
Etc.
As for Dilbert... here's something worth wondering about: several comic strips paint the PHB as being unable to read people's reactions. In one, he can't tell if Wally is sleeping or working, when looking at him from the front. Several make sense only if he isn't even aware of the harm he does. That guy has Asperger's Syndrome. He's a nerd. A complete nerd, in fact.
And if I'm allowed to run amok with analyzing a cartoon character too far: while it is possible that his narrow focus of interest (practically a given for an aspie) was management from the start, it's very _unusual_ for that disorder. Asperger's Syndrome is a bit like being colour blind, only it's about human reactions instead of about colours. The typical way is to end up fascinated with numbers, technology or the like, not with the people that you can't even understand much. My money is that such a person started from engineering, CS or some other such field.
And, yes, I know that it is just a cartoon character, and I'm not pretending that it's real or anything. I _am_ however guessing that it might be based on one or more managers that Scott Adams worked with before.
Two wrongs don't make a right, you know? Yes, some engineers are incompetent, and some are as out of touch with reality as to design an engine block with the spark plugs underneath. (To pick an example of something a mechanic would dislike thoroughly.)
1. Adding an incompetent manager on the next layer doesn't fix it. It just makes the total problem even worse. You can't say it's ok to add an incompetent boss, just because a lot of those under him will be incompetent too.
2. Yes, an engineer will not know everything. E.g., the ones doing physical engineering may not know much about industrial design, or programmers usually don't know much about GUI design. That's why we have a whole organization, not a lone maverick designing it all. You have to mix and match the skills of several people, to have a good design. From the guy designing the engine, to the one designing a pleasing dashboard, to the marketer doing a study in which colour should it have to be attractive to buyers. It's a _team_ effort.
And guess what? The role of a manager is precisely to organize such a heterogenous team, and make sure it has the right mix of skills and that they're used right.
Basically if you can notice the shortcomings of an individual there (e.g., "damn engineers who put the spark plugs there"), you're actually noticing a management failure too. The guy who should have had the missing skill, wasn't there or wasn't listened to. Even if you want to expect that engineers should have had <insert extra skill> in the first place, then someone should have taken that into account when hiring them. If a whole team ended up with _all_ members missing that skill that everyone should have had... why did they get hired then? Or, again, then why wasn't an extra guy hired who has that extra skill needed, and whose job is to apply it.
Slashdot Mirror
1. So, you think that those men with property didn't vote for their own personal gain? I wonder where, say, those slavery laws came from. Right, from rich men trying to make it easier for them to oppress other humans.
The sad thing is, there is no limit at which you had enough and you start working (or voting) just for the common good. The brain doesn't even see absolute values, it sees deltas. Your happiness or unhappiness have more to do with how much better or worse you are than yesterday, than with exactly where you are. So someone who has 1$ wants to have $2, someone who has $1000 want to have $2000, but someone who has a billion will need to get two billions to get the same shot of "I'm happy" chemical signals in the brain.
So basically if you think that, "Voting has become the enabling mechanism for thieves to ply their craft"... well, then it always was. That discrimination just divided the class into already successful thieves, and a mass of victims to ply their craft on. The former voted to rob the latter.
2. So what was the improvement compared to medieval aristocracy? You still had a rich class who are supposedly smart enough to decide for everyone else, and a poor class who should shut up and do what they're told. And the former use that mechanism to exploit and plunder the latter.
What's the difference? That the rich get to elect a president? Well, that's how it worked for the HRE, medieval Poland, and a bunch of other places. Heck, medieval Poland was then actually more democratic, because everyone who ever had a noble as an ancestor could vote, so actually even some of the poor got to vote. That the rich also get a say in which laws they get? Again, see the HRE.
I thought that the whole idea of democracy was that the _people_ are in charge. You know, what with even its name being a combination of "demos"=people and "kratos"=rule or power.
3. You know, I wish you guys would find a better fallacy than the theft to justify your greed with. The moment you can function just as well on your own, without the rest of society, _then_ you can say with a straight face that it's 100% your money and anyone having any demands is a thief.
But the fact is, society works as a whole, and money is just a convenient abstraction for how we divde the cake we _all_ helped make. So somehow you think you're that important that you're entitled to a disproportionately larger slice, for the same number of hours worked. And woe if someone doesn't let you loot and plunder the pie as you see fit, at other people's disadvantage, 'cause then that's stealing.
You wouldn't have your job or your standard of living without at least a thousand or so other people working on making that shit you use as status symbols. And if we're talking taxes, your company _and_ its clients wouldn't be anywhere near where they are without the infrastructure built with those taxes. Without the roads to transport the raw materials, or the pool of educated potential clerks and researchers, or a pool of qualified unemployed people to absorb the shocks and bursts, or a gazillion other things, you'd be right back to the 19'th century standard of living.
So you're telling me, what? That all those should happen without you having to pay your share? Who's going to pay for it then? Oh, right, I forgot, you wanted to take the poors' right to vote, so you can plunder _them_.
I'm sorry, but that's not a God-given right, that's a parasitic attitude. Yes, you can pack it in some pretense that if someone doesn't let you take half a poor guy's slice too, it's theft, but it doesn't change the aspect: it's all bullshit rethoric for "I want half of those people's slices too." That's what being a parasite is all about.
Well, if you're going to take it that literally, I guess not many things make sense to you.
1. We're talking about frogs, not bacteria. You know, a lot more complex stuff, where evolution happens a lot slower.
2. I never mentioned a start and a stop. That's your own strawman. But in a lot of these situations, yes, you could put such goalposts anyway. How about: from where we started changing their environment (e.g., turning a lake anoxic) to when they can actually survive there. If the second doesn't happen within a given time from the first, they're dead. That's your "start" and "stop" in that race.
3. I'm talking enough evolution to deal with radically different conditions, not about the minor mutations every birth has.
But on the whole, I'm under the impressions that you were just looking for some detail to take out of context, deliberately misunderstand, spout some irrelevat truisms, and get the ego-boost of "omg, I found someomne I could sound smart to." Well, I could put it nastier, but let's just put it like this: if your dose of ego-masturbation is to try to put someone between you and the bottom of the proverbial barrel, you already know where you are in relation to that bottom of the barrel. Nothing I could say probably can make it any worse.
If only it were that simple.
1. Evolution takes time.
If you don't have damn good DNA repair mechanisms, different cells in your body change randomly to do different things than what's needed, and you die. (E.g., of cancer.) So there's an upper cap on how often mutations can happen, which puts an upper cap on how fast you can evolve. Heck, even small-ish evolutions in tens of thousands of years are called accelerated evolution.
We're talking about "since 1970" here, which isn't even a blip at evolution scales. _No_ species ever evolved in 38 years.
2. Evolution really works like in the joke about the guys camping, and one of the guys putting on his sports shoes when they see a pissed off tiger: you don't have to outrun the tiger, you have to outrun the other guy. You don't have to be the fastest gazelle, you just have to outrun the slowest when the lions drop by.
What I'm indirectly getting at is that it worked in situations where there was a slow changing equilibrium between hunter and prey, or between species and environment. On the whole, the species still has to be survivable in the short run. It doesn't work for "bang, you're dead!" situations. And normally they do get that short term survivability. Even a species whose become relatively unfit, gets breaks as its lowering numbers also causes the predator population to drop, and buys the prey some more time. Or viceversa, a relatively unfit predator gets a break as the prey over-multiplies and eventually it gets enough of a meal even from sick prey or corpses.
The natural selection will then keep culling from the lower end, and over millions of years, the species gets better.
No species can evolve into something better if you keep hunting it into extinction within decades, or dump poison into its water, or cut down its habitat and replace it with a parking lot. Or if you keep hunting it past the point where predator-prey equilibrium would have allowed it to rebound, that's it, really. Game over.
3. While I sorta see your point about climate change,
A) it doesn't apply for situations when we pollute a place overnight, or when we cause an eutrophication and the algae bloom suffocates everything else
B) you also have to remember that climate change is a bit over-sold these days. It's the #1 best selling sin, and _everything_ gets blamed on it first. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but that it does get blamed for more than it actually caused.
In this case, we don't _know_ whether these frogs died because of climate change or, say, because of pollution. As more and more third world and developing countries industrialize, they pollute more and more. And again, let's not forget that while the carbon cult is obsessed with CO2 only, early unregulated industry puts out a lot more immediately poisonous stuff. Both in the air _and_ in the water, which, as mentioned, is the amphibians' problem: they depend on both.
Seriously, half the world still doesn't have any filters on their factories, or any other environment protection, or still uses lead in its pipes and gasoline. You start worrying about the quality of air when you already have other more stringent QOL components covered. When you're dirt poor, you care more about getting food, clean water, medicine, and a job. As long as even those are hit and miss, or in a lot of places more miss than hit, you don't give a fuck about that factory dumping toxic stuff into the air or water. Lead in the air (e.g., from leaded gasoline) might affect you later, while lack of food will kill you right now.
As little as a new factory starting production, can poison the water of several species over night. Sure, someone out there will scream about all the CO2 from it, as if that were all that could possibly ever matter, and in the long run maybe it even is, but it will be the other chemicals that kill in the short run. Or if that factory produces fertilizers, again, you _could_ worry about the CO2 it produces, but that's an eutrophication event waiting to happen,
Well, don't get me wrong, it was a good game... with a crap interface. Personally I just went physical combat all the way, so at least I don't have to deal with the spell silliness.
1. Well, it was on the PC, so it was mouse and keyboard.
2. Now if only someone could have invented... I don't know... some kind of a row of icons on the screen to remind me which number is assigned to which spell. Oh, wait, it's called a toolbar and pretty much all games _except_ Oblivion have one.
And what if it wouldn't need me to lift my hand off the movement keys -- since I play with the numeric gamepad, not WASD -- and move them all the way across the keyboard to hit those numbers and then back. It actually was less of a pain to do the sequence I described.
Seriously, I didn't like the Oblivion interface at all.
Well, I know about the usual modding capabilities, but it's not moddable yet. I have to wonder how long it will take. It's entirely possible to get the CS in January, if someone from marketing doesn't want their game re-rated AO because of mods before christmas. (AO = no shelf space at Wall-Mart.) It remains to be seen.
Well, if I want to be pessimistic, I'd say that I thought the same about Mass Effect too. I mean, it's from the guys who made Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2! Surely it's just a matter of time until they let us mod it. Turns out it wasn't just lacking modding tools, but was also saddled with a DRM that craps out if you touch any of the resource files at all. I.e., it was even less moddable than KOTOR, which at least could be modded with some modified NWN tools. Fuckers.
At any rate, as long as that's not yet available, well, I'll judge the game by how it is now, not by how it might be at some undefined time in the future :P
Actually, tbh I found it a lot less console-y than Oblivion.
In Oblivion, my main problem with the console interface was magic. It just didn't work. To do any kind of spell switching -- and you had to do that all the time, e.g., between attack spells, shielding yourself, and healing spells -- you had to switch to the menu, scroll through an ever growing list of spells (IIRC there was no way to delete old ones), "equip" the other spell, switch back, cast it, etc. More pain in the rear than it's worth. The key combos to do any of the special attacks or defenses (e.g., dodge was jump then block), also felt a lot more like a hack and slash platformer than a proper RPG.
I find that by contrast the Fallout 3 interface just works. It's maybe not perfect, but it's perfectly palatable as a FPS/RPG interface, and doesn't break immersion all the time.
Actually, I do remember a piece of news from a while ago. Apparently the chinese deorbit their craft to hit their own territory, not the ocean. And one managed to hit a house and cave in the roof, even though it wasn't aimed at a densely populated area or anything.
The peasant was quoted as saying something like, well, maybe it brings good luck or something.
Well, I guess, on the bright side, IIRC feng-shui means something like "wind and water", and without a roof he'll surely get more of both ;)
1. Well, yes, every _other_ weapon in Fallout 2 was fictional, but only every other.
So it's somewhat inexact to say that it "everything was "10mm pistol", "assault rifle", "sniper rifle" and so on."
2. Fallout Tactics was from Interplay too, so it is just as canon. Much as I understand why many fans of 1 and 2 like to ignore that it existed. There it went even heavier into RL weapon names.
3. Well, it's not like I'm going to lead a mob with torches and pitchforks over that issue, but it seems to me that between
A) naming the drugs according to Fallout canon, and
B) debatably breaking the canon with regard to guns,
the latter is more worthy of bithching. Or rather, the former is _less_ worthy of bitching. I'm not going to lose much sleep over the latter either, but the former... I don't even understand what the fuss is about. So they named the drugs like in Fallout 1 and 2. Wtf is there to protest about that? It's like protesting that Oblivion has daedric equipment.
1. As a Fallout geek, I don't even understand the fuss. The drugs in Fallout 1 and 2 were already called stuff like Buffout, Jet, etc. So, lore-wise, it's a change for the better.
I mean, sure, I could live with a name like "Morphine" too, but I see no reason to run amok about their respecting the canon either. It's Fallout, people. Getting upset that the drugs in the Fallout universe have Fallout names, is a bit as silly as getting upset that a LOTR game has mithril. Sure, you could call it "titanium" instead of "mithril", but it won't actually make the game better. It's the canon for that world, silly.
2. If I were to bitch about a name change there, I'd rather bitch about the weapon names. Fallout always had real weapon names, like the G11 or AK-47 or FN-FAL or whatnot. Now suddenly we have non-descript stuff like "chinese pistol" and "chinese assault-rifle." WTF?
3. In fact, I wonder if the whole "let's name the drugs RL names" thing was just a PR stunt to cause a lot of talk.
I mean, if you look at the whole thing, it is schizophrenic to the extreme. The weapons get changed to non-RL names, the canon be damned, _but_ at the same time they supposedly really wanted to change canon-correct drug names to stuff like "Morphine". It makes no sense. There is no coherent plan in there.
My guess is that they never actually planned to release it with RL drug names, and just pulled a PR coup to get a lot of talk about their game. I.e., that this isn't as much a censorship story, but really a story about PR bullshit.
*shrug* I didn't say I'd sue, so...
Actually, if you've looked at enough game forums, you'll see lots of bans which are for stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with being uncivilized.
There are whole companies where they delete posts, and even ban accounts for stuff like reporting or discussing bugs. And I don't mean the "you gay motherfuckers get off your lazy arses and fix my pet peeve right now" kind of "discussion", but even mentioning that some exploits exist at all, or that some DRM bug has prevented someone from starting the game. Especially if someone from Marketing got ideas like, "omg, if people find out we have bugs or multiplayer exploits, our sales will drop, and we can't have that before Christmas." But whatever the reason, trying to prevent people from posting bugs, especially if a bug has showed up already too often on the forum, _is_ a pretty popular way to avoid fixing them.
Heck, Sony even had a sandbox for new forum users (which included veterans finally activating their forum account), just so they can't complain about the NGE in SWG. Apparently enough people activated their forum account just to say a final "good bye, but this is no longer fun" when unsubscribing, and we can't have that, can we?
I also remember forum bans and account bans for as little as distasteful fanfic about someone's game. But it wasn't in the game, and it wasn't even on the game's forums. Just, you know, if you dare post something we dislike about our games, we'll kick you out.
So I'm really not looking forward for more of that dictatorial accounts. If someone actually cheated in a multiplayer game or anything, fine, ban them. But not for offending an already arbitrary forum moderation system.
And how does a Spore ban (since they used that particular example) even fit that picture? Even EA marketed Spore as a "massively single-player game". Let's say I was a forum troll. So exactly how's my temper going to affect someone else's game? Can I even get into anyone's game to spew obscenities at them? Or what?
Plus, here's another idea: it seems to me like if you have a player rebellion on your hands, on the forums or in game or otherwise, the best policy is to be open and fair. People don't run amok about a bug when they know it'll get put in the queue and looked at later. You might get one, though, if it becomes obvious that you use PR bullshit and deleting bug reports, instead of fixing very real problems and exploits. They don't run amok about some griefer being banned, especially if again you're open as to why and what the rules are. You get a virtual rebellion when you're acting like an ass to the customers in the first place.
Adding a game ban there just adds injury to the already existing insult.
Well, then let me be the one who says it. Deus Ex was a mix of FPS, RPG, Stealth, etc, elements, and it was quite easy to be disappointed, if you liked one and hated the others. Sorta like chocolate filled with cherry liqueur doesn't necessarily appeal to everyone who likes chocolate, fruit or booze, but rather to an intersection. There'll be plenty of people who still won't find it a substitute for fresh fruit, for example.
And yes, it had multiple ways of solving everything, but not all ways of solving any particular situation. Regardless of which of the genres they mixed you liked (again, unless you like them all), there's always be some places where your favourite just didn't work at all. And regardless of which you hated, there'd be several places where that was the best or indeed only option that worked.
E.g., their emphasis on stealth was about as much fun as root canal for _me_. I don't buy an RPG to end up playing Solid Snake instead. (Not saying there's anything wrong with you if you like stealth games, btw, just that tastes are subjective and _I_ don't.)
The mistake _some_ people make is to assume that everyone likes the same things they do, hence if you disliked it, you either didn't actually play it or here's a list with what's wrong with you. In reality tastes are subjective, and what you like someone else might hate. And making a hash of half a dozen genres... well, someone who liked them all, will no doubt be in Nirvana. (And I don't mean the band;) I can see how they'd think it's the best thing since sliced bread. But it's really catering to the intersection of the fans of those individual genres, not to the union. Someone like me who likes RPG but hates sneaking, will dislike having that adition shoved down his throat under the "but it's really an RPG" excuse. Someone who likes FPS but hates talking to people or managing skills, will feel cheated by those RPG additions. Etc.
That said, the same applies to some of us who really really liked Fallout 1 and 2 as they were. I really liked having a small army with me, and I really liked the turn based system. It was more like playing chess than like a twitch game. And mashing the pause key (ok, VATS key) doesn't even come close to being the same thing.
Now I _can_ live with it, but mostly because I'm resigned to the idea that thinking games are a dying breed, and the mass of the market is made of various other categories who want to play to relax their brain. Not saying it with contempt or anything, but that's genuinely the impression I'm getting. The same goes for most other genres. There are more people who played, say, the Mech Warrior games because they're cool 3D ego-shooters with big robots, than people who play MegaMek because it's an accurate implementation of BattleTech and needs doing maths with dice and modifiers.
And in the end, what you illustrate there is largely how useless a term "RPG" has become. _Almost_ anything, including far greater deviations than Deus Ex can still be called RPG with a straight face. Did you know that Daikatana claimed to have RPG elements? (And yes, I played that too. To the end. I still have the disk and the manual, come to think of it.) There are people who've claimed that fighting games are RPGs because they have a health bar which is sorta like HP in D&D. There are people who've claimed that the Gran Turismo series, excellent racing simulators as they really are, are RPGs at heart because you can use money to buy upgrades and that's sorta like having xp and levelling up. I'm not making it up.
So saying that Deux Ex or anything else is still an RPG, really doesn't say much at this point. It's only marginally more speciffic than saying that it's a video game.
It's certainly too large a category by now to even say that someone is a fan of the whole sprawling genre, because it really includes stuff ranging from turn-based tactics to RTS to FPS with a little story to God knows what else. It's become so sprawled that it's in the meantime possible to love a subgenre of it, and hate another, although they're both RPGs.
Actually, it seems to me like there is plenty of smoke for which no fire has ever been found, and for which it's been even proven that a fire never existed. And increasingly more there are agencies (e.g., PR agencies) _paid_ to create fake smoke to convince you to buy someone's snake oil. Astroturfing, buzz marketing campaigns, PR campaigns, think-tanks, fake news, FUD campaigns, etc, you name it. There's a whole industry whose job is to make lots of smoke, and hope you're stupid enough to believe that there might be a fire there after all.
In fact, I'd propose that as the mark of the modern-day gullible guy. That innocent belief that there must be some truth in it, or those guys wouldn't say it. Sometimes even to the extent that if it were a lie, surely nobody would be _allowed_ to write it on a web page. Ignoring all the evidence that some people earn their living with selling you lies, half-truths, and stuff that would technically be true except it's handpicked out of context and arranged into pointing in whatever direction they want to point.
What makes something news is the evidence that it indeed happened, not the amount of second-hand smoke that tries to point at a non-existent fire.
Otherwise, if you just go by "there is no smoke without fire", you might as well go help that nigerian widdow get her millions already, since there's plenty of "smoke" by now. There's millions of people who've received emails about it after all. With that much smoke there must be some fire there.
And just for the sake of annoying the local crackpots, there's plenty of smoke about:
- spiritism / magic / paranormal stuff, in spite of a still unclaimed 1 million dollars Randi prize for anyone who can prove having such powers (not to mention Houdini and many others before Randi)
- that some miracle pill having been invented in Russia / China / whatever-far-and-exotic-place that cures all diseases, regardless of whether they're bacterial, fungal, viral, DNA-damage or auto-immune (hint: they're massively different things), and will apparently even grow back your destroyed pancreas, because it cures auto-immune diabetes too! Only some nebulous pharma conspiracy keeps them from talking about it.
- that while millions of doctors and nurses and pharma investors and managers die of cancer every year, all would rather die in horrible pain than admit there's a cure for cancer and use it to save themselves
- spooky mind-probe rays. Where do you think "tin foil hat" came from?
Etc.
All of those exist, and some even make millions for the snake-oil peddlers, because, basically, some people are gullible enough to think there must be a fire there if there's so much smoke.
Actually, the funny thing is that Web 2.0 vs Web 1.0 wasn't even supposed to be about technology as such. And the inventor of that buzzword still insists that it isn't, long after the Grinch... err... the marketing bulshitters stole it and ran away with it.
Web 2.0 -- and by contrast Web 1.0 -- wasn't about techno-fetishism, but about techno-utopianism. It has nothing to do with PHP or any other particular technology.
The basic idea of Web 2.0 was that if you put a million monkeys on a million keyboards, they're still monkeys. But if you interconnect them and let them write and edit each other's content, now that's teh nirvana and age of enlightenment. Give the users wikis instead of writing your own content. (I'm sure you'll be thrilled to discover that your product was made from baby seals and your CEO blows goats, but, hey, if the users wrote it, it must be true. 'Cause emergent collective intelligence is never wrong;) Have forums. Let the users tag your content instead of categorizing it or any other automated way of finding it. (I'm sure the tags on Slashdot would be sooo much more useful to find an article than full-text search;) Etc.
At a basic level, none of those _really_ needs PHP or JavaScript or anything. You could make a primitive almost-wiki back in the day, by just giving the users FTP access to the site and letting them edit and re-upload the HTML files.
Anyway, in true zealot fashion, where no price is too high for his utopia if someone else pays it, this was packed in a further lie: that, see, that's also the path to making the big bucks and verily everyone will beg to give you their money if you only had a wiki. I guess you can't really preach stuff like, "why you should blow your money to give us our free, collaborative online utopia", so it had to be repacked as, "you could be the next Google if you do!"
No, seriously. If you listen to him, Tim O'Reilly looked at what companies survived the dot-com bubble and what were their defining characteristics. And somehow he managed to completely miss the fact that it's those who had a business plan, silly. E.g., that why Google thrived was because Google became the damn best ad provider. Nah, what he saw is that it was those with wikis, and bittorrent and other collaborative stuff. That's the way to the big bucks.
So he envisioned and preached a DotCom Bubble 2.0... er... Web 2.0 golden age, where everyone has those, and someone gives them money for nothing for doing it.
And 1998 will get its analogy back, when it stops being relevant to the present.
Because for example this (kind of) PR story is just that: "Hey, there's gold in them there (virtual) hills! Get yer gear hear and be the first to stake your claim!" That's it. That's the whole story in a nutshell.
I even propose an empyrical test for detecting such scams: the anecdote of the medieval alchemist who goes to a king and tells him that he's discovered the secret of creating cheap endless gold. And only asks for a bag of gold in return for the secret. So the king gives him an empty bad and tells him something like, "well, you already know how to make gold. Fill it for yourself."
Someone who genuinely knew how to make gold, would just fill the bag for himself. And someone who really thought that the first to open a 3D virtual shop will earn billions, would just do that quietly and hope that the others give him at least a year before they start competing in that space. Or maybe even take some patents and try to prevent the others from competing at all.
But more and more we have the story of someone who believe there's a billion to be made in X, but _you_ should do it, not him. He'll just sell you the gear for it. Hmm.
Sadly, I know at least two people who diverted into management, and two more who branched into being a lower paid admin, in spite of being damn good at coding. Just because they got convinced that if they don't give up coding before the 40's they're gonna become teh stupid. The rampant ageism is sad as it is, but seeing it cause self-destructive behaviour like that is just depressing.
Real translation: some guy at IBM figured out there's money to be made from those who _haven't_ realized that yet. So, in keeping with the tradition of hyping technologies to people who don't actually need them, next you'll see IBM and a few others pitching something along the lines of WebSphere Virtual World Server 7.1 as the second cumming of Christ. To CIOs whose idea of staying on top of their branch is reading lists of buzzwords, from paid-for-PR articles disguised as technology news.
See, there's this funny thing about gold rushes. Almost invariably the only ones who made money are not the miners. It's those who sold equipment and food to them.
A lot of business in the IT world lately is creating your own fake gold rush by PR, and trying to sell picks to some people who won't strike gold because there is none. And this reads like yet another bubble trying to get started. The message is, basically, "OMG, there's so much money to be made from virtual worlds, and there are all these people who'd take you more seriously and give you more money if they could walk into your 3D virtual shop dressed as a furry. But you have to be careful about what virtual world and business kit you get, you know? Get ours." Have you heard that before? Right. A million times, probably.
E.g., Web 2.0: you'd get so much money and be the only ones profitable online, if you only had forums, and tags, and wikis, and supported BitTorrent. 'Cause it's all about empowering the users, baby. Build a better community web site, and they'll just beg to give you their money. No seriously, that's what the Web 2.0 trademark was supposed to mean. Well, until it was hijacked. There wasn't enough to be sold with that idea, so it got hijacked to mean: buy our funky javascript frameworks and servers, and you'll get everyone wanting to buy stuff from you. People only take an e-commerce site seriously if it has a megabyte of javascript per page, ya know?
E.g., portals. Everything has to be done using portlets, and reinvent in Javascript badly the multiple windows and window management that your OS already had anyway. Customers will only take you seriously and give you lots of money if you buy our portlet server. And here's a few strawmen and non-sequiturs about how if it's done with any different technology, it can't possibly be the view and the information that the customer wants. (Confusing content with a presentation layer technology, basically.)
Etc.
So now the next message and bubble will be: do it with 3D virtual worlds! Buy our virtual shop kit, and this time the customers will really take you seriously! Would we lie to you? Again?
Yes, they're called sociopaths. They're medically unable to accept personal responsibility, or feel themselves as the same as other people.
1. If someone habitually takes the wrong decisions, or end up not even bothering to try to get as much needed information as possible, then they _are_ incompetent. No matter whether they're engineers or managers.
Basically, I feel no need to pretend that everyone is special in their own way, and we're all right in different ways. Some people just are incompetent. Yes, that means engineers too. (Or doctors, or anything else.) Sometimes that mechanic bitching about the stupid engineer who designed a bad engine, actually _is_ right. That holds true for other domains too. According to various studies, as much as 2 out of 3 programmers don't even know the language they're paid to program in. I see no reason to assume that managers are all competent either, especially in the face of overwhelming disproof. There too, some are good, some are bad, and some are just bloody stupid.
2. The fact that people will disagree on the details doesn't really say that all are equally right, or anything. A lot of quibbles are about the details, or about changes that should change the overall efficiency by 1%, or about the price you pay for them. That's not the kind of failures I'm concerned with. There _are_ plenty of decisions -- both by engineers and by managers -- which aren't just different ways to solve the same problem, and not just a matter of seeing a bigger picture, and not just a matter of lack of information, but just a matter of plain old stupidity or incompetence. I have no problem with calling it just that.
3. Lack of information is sometimes inevitable (e.g., nobody really knows the fashion of 2010), but a lot of times inexcusable by itself. An engineer who doesn't know something he needs to design a particular engine, well, unless he's doing truly breakthrough stuff and discovering new science, well, why doesn't he know that? There are plenty of books, magazines, or just plain old Google. Ditto for a manager who doesn't know what's going on in his own team.
And there's especially a mode of failure that I won't excuse, I'll actually condemn the most: taking decisions based on just buzzword lists, wishful thinking, or one's own imagination, instead of even trying to get more actual information. There's a medical term for mistaking one's own fantasy for reality: paranoid schizophrenia.
Mostly I'm going to aggree with your main idea, at least at a theoretical level. My point was mostly revolving around the following empyrical observations:
They _are_ however very different skills, so it's a bit like hoping for someone who is a great archaeologist _and_ a commando trooper. Sure, it worked for Indiana Jones and Lara Croft, but it's more rare IRL. And
Unfortunately almost every expert promoted to management, ends up gradually slipping back to be that. Just because suddenly they're doing something else instead of keeping honing their skills and learning the new technologies.
A lot of those bosses who know just enough to say something dumb, are someone who was once a genius in COBOL or APL or RPG2, and now can't understand why these Java guys can't do it like in the good old days. They were once on the top of their field. But give them a promotion which no longer requires honing their old skills, and doesn't give them more time to learn new stuff than weekly reading the latest buzzwords off some IT-for-PHBs ragazine, and roll the clock forward 10 years... and they're now that PHB who remembers just little enough to be dangerous.
In fact, since it all started from the Dilbert Principle, if I were to put Dilbert's PHB in one category, he's probably the super-nerd who wrote the company's whole IT system back in the COBOL days.
Before I get started: I _am_ a reserve sergeant, though not that it means much. I also do have a bit of a hobby about history.
So based on that, it seems to me that:
1. Pin-and-flank is the basic maneuver that all armies use and are trained to use nowadays. Ideally, you pin with two units and try to flank with a third. Whether it's at platoon level (pin with 2 squads, flank with a third) or done at whole army level with divisions (pin with 2, flank with the third), you pin and try to flank, while the enemy tries to do the same to you.
And everyone is trained so they do work together. From recruits doing basic drills to military academies training generals, _everyone_ is trained to pin and flank. Any modern war is pins-and-flanks _within_ pins-and-flanks.
2. Any army is not your average PUG (Pick-Up Group) in a MMO, and not even your average guild group. We're talking people who've been drilled into working together until that stuff becomes a reflex and you do it without thinking. When it's your turn to lay the suppression fire while that other guy dashes forward, you don't even think "it's my turn", you just do it.
In fact, _the_ one stat that would be best used to describe any unit in a RL army, wouldn't be "hp" or "dps", but cohesion. An army is only as good as its ability to act together as a single entity. When that breaks down, it wipes out.
It's not even a modern thing. From the Greek phalanx, to the british squares at Waterloo, to any modern war, the unit that stays cohesive a second longer wins. The Phalanx that broke into individual soldiers, got owned. The musket square that lost cohesion, got _rolled_ _over_ by cavalry from a corner. Etc.
So, yes, you _have_ to have people who _really_ work together, or you've lost before you even started. If that group doesn't work together, before the first bullet has been shot, before the artillery duel even started, you've already lost. Heck, if you're even in a situation to wonder, like you do, if the team will actually act together, you have already lost. You just don't know it yet.
3. To get back to flanking, it's again not just modern stuff, it's been a basic thing for millenia. Those cavalry wings ("ala") of a roman legion were there to, at the very least, stop the enemy cavalry from flanking. If a general did nothing smarter at all, he would at the very least try to use his most mobile units to flank. It's been used with chariots, it's been done with cavalry, it's been done with tanks, heck even ship classes have been designed for the sole role of "crossing the T", which was the naval version of flanking.
4. War is complicated shit, and always was complex shit. Again, it's not your average MMO group.
If you look at most known wars from the last few thousand years, they invariably involved more than just rows of soldiers facing each other. There were feints, flankings, ambushes, trops kept in reserve so the enemy would face fresh troops when it's tired, creative use of terrains, etc. Almost invariably the guy who won was the guy who pulled some unexpected stunt and caught the other unprepared. Far larger armies have been wiped by smaller ones whose general pulled some inventive stunt.
The guys who applied the KISS principle... well, the graveyards and historical lists of losers are full of them. 'Nuff said.
Heck, even combined arms tactics, are inherently more complex, but it's what wins wars. The guys who keep it simple, get owned by those who don't. Almost every single time.
Basically: don't judge real wars by the untrained kids who play a MMO. Flanking, cover, complex tactics, etc, don't even work on MMOs, and neither the code nor the design are there to even sense them happening. But they are what wins or loses a real fight.
Well, actually, taking a guess at what period you mean by "as a kid", by your description: nobody wanted to pay for that shuttle.
The original Shuttle concept was a small, reusable craft, mostly for getting a couple of people into orbit, and at most some minimal cargo. It was a space car. Or, ok, maybe pickup truck.
Also, very importantly: only in some orbits. Getting anything in an equatorial LEO is cheap because the Earth's rotation helps you a bit. Getting something in a polar orbit is more expensive. Not only you have to supply the whole orbital speed yourself, you have to _lose_ the speed you started with because of Earth's rotation. Otherwise it would be merely a very inclined orbit, not a polar one.
But what happened was that NASA didn't actually get a budget for it. So they started looking at which other agency they can swindle out of its budget. And there was the Air Force, which used these huge rockets to put spy sats into orbit. And they had a budget for those.
So NASA goes to them and says, basically, "hey, if you give us your lunch money, we can build a reusable launch vehicle for you, and put your sats up there for peanuts ever after. Better yet: we can also go pack one up and bring it down." The Air Force liked both ideas. Lots.
But their spy sats were freaking huge, and they had to go into polar orbits. The Shuttle had to be inflated to accomodate that. Instead of a pickup truck, it became a freakin' huge 18 wheeler truck.
Now funnily enough, this made the Shuttle a failure on both counts:
A) It failed to keep its promise to the Air Force, and those guys still ended up using their own rockets, because the Shuttle was too unreliable and made a trip once in a blue moon. And about bringing them back down, remember that news where they shot one down with a missile shot off a cruiser? Yeah. That's not what NASA had promised them.
B) The original idea was that the space shuttle will be so cheap per launch, that even for TV or telecom sats, it'll be cheaper to just pack it on the shuttle and put it up that way, than use a normal rocket. Even skipping past the unavailability for such things, here's a thought: now it was too big for economics to work that way. If you have a 1 ton sat to put up there, you don't pack it on a 2000 ton shuttle, because just the fuel alone costs more than a traditional rocket. Just as you wouldn't pack it on a 2000 ton truck to ship it across the country. Some jobs _are_ better suited for a small pickup truck, which the shuttle no longer was.
Actually, from my experience in software, the absolute worst PHB's I've ever seen, were ex-programmers. Some of them _brilliant_ ex-programmers. But they were crap at dealing with people, even worse at organizing things, hated being in meetings half the time now, and most of them also expected their employees to meet and exceed some standards that they themselves actually failed. (Except maybe in their own mind.)
A rough breakdown, off the top of my head, is somewhat like this:
- two ended up obnoxious control freaks, and convinced that nothing ever gets done unless they pester someone to death. One of them used to click on Netscape's title bar to show it that he's watching. He genuinely believed that it loaded pages faster if it knew the boss is watching . (Freaking hillarious or freaking sad, for someone who had been a brilliant programmer before. You decide which.)
- one ended up personally doing the programs of his whole team, because it was less stress than trying to organize and manage that team. He'd make up by lashing out with random acts of mis-management, presumably more to show himself that he's still the boss, than to show it to his underlings.
- two ended up what I can only describe as yes-men in both directions. They basically avoided managing, by pretending to be on everyone's side, both from above and from below.
- one ended up, basically a depressed whiner.
Etc.
As for Dilbert... here's something worth wondering about: several comic strips paint the PHB as being unable to read people's reactions. In one, he can't tell if Wally is sleeping or working, when looking at him from the front. Several make sense only if he isn't even aware of the harm he does. That guy has Asperger's Syndrome. He's a nerd. A complete nerd, in fact.
And if I'm allowed to run amok with analyzing a cartoon character too far: while it is possible that his narrow focus of interest (practically a given for an aspie) was management from the start, it's very _unusual_ for that disorder. Asperger's Syndrome is a bit like being colour blind, only it's about human reactions instead of about colours. The typical way is to end up fascinated with numbers, technology or the like, not with the people that you can't even understand much. My money is that such a person started from engineering, CS or some other such field.
And, yes, I know that it is just a cartoon character, and I'm not pretending that it's real or anything. I _am_ however guessing that it might be based on one or more managers that Scott Adams worked with before.
Two wrongs don't make a right, you know? Yes, some engineers are incompetent, and some are as out of touch with reality as to design an engine block with the spark plugs underneath. (To pick an example of something a mechanic would dislike thoroughly.)
1. Adding an incompetent manager on the next layer doesn't fix it. It just makes the total problem even worse. You can't say it's ok to add an incompetent boss, just because a lot of those under him will be incompetent too.
2. Yes, an engineer will not know everything. E.g., the ones doing physical engineering may not know much about industrial design, or programmers usually don't know much about GUI design. That's why we have a whole organization, not a lone maverick designing it all. You have to mix and match the skills of several people, to have a good design. From the guy designing the engine, to the one designing a pleasing dashboard, to the marketer doing a study in which colour should it have to be attractive to buyers. It's a _team_ effort.
And guess what? The role of a manager is precisely to organize such a heterogenous team, and make sure it has the right mix of skills and that they're used right.
Basically if you can notice the shortcomings of an individual there (e.g., "damn engineers who put the spark plugs there"), you're actually noticing a management failure too. The guy who should have had the missing skill, wasn't there or wasn't listened to. Even if you want to expect that engineers should have had <insert extra skill> in the first place, then someone should have taken that into account when hiring them. If a whole team ended up with _all_ members missing that skill that everyone should have had... why did they get hired then? Or, again, then why wasn't an extra guy hired who has that extra skill needed, and whose job is to apply it.
That's the job of management: to manage it all.