Buddy, I don't see anywhere there saying that it's adjusted for inflation, so I'll assume it's not. And that makes those numbers illustrate quite the opposite: that lot of Americans were actually impoverished in that time.
I don't know the exact numbers for the whole almost 30 years, so let's pull a number out of the butt. Let's say the average inflation in that time was 2%. Well, my xcalc says that 1.02^30=1.81. So one dollar back then will be about 1.8$ right now. Or viceversa 1 / 1.8 = 0.55, or 1$ right now is 55% of what it was back then.
(The numbers vary quite quickly with the exact number of the average inflation there, btw. E.g., an increase of only from 2.0% to 2.5% changes the final result from 1.8 to over 2.4. And I'd expect the reality to be actually more in line with that, since, frankly, the dollar's value dropped to half in the last few years alone. But let's go with that conservative estimate for now.)
So if you're telling me that the percentage of americans which were under 30,000 back then is the same as right now, you're effectively telling me that the effective salary of that population segment dropped by 45%. (From 100% to 55%.)
Yes, you could say that now more people are in dual-income households, but that's just saying that now two people must work to earn effectively the same salary as one person back then. That's not an improvement, sorry. Needing to work twice for effectively about the same wage isn't an improvement.
Or you're telling me that back then 12% were earning more than $100,000 in 1979 money, while now 24% earn more than $55,000 in 1979 money. Well, blimey, probably the same was the case in 1979 too, if not better. If you did the equivalent and said, "how many earn more than $180,000 nowadays?" I don't know the result, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it was actually lower than 12%. I don't know of that horribly many jobs which are in _that_ bracket.
That's not "woohoo, cut-throat corporatism is making us all richer." It's a scary picture of it making a heck of a lot of people poorer.
I'm not going to disagree with you at all. If I'm allowed a small addition, I'd add why that's even a good thing.
See, the whole idea behind capitalism, going all the way to Adam Smith, is that it essentially optimizes using the resources we have, to create the things we actually need. You have X million people, Y million acres of land, etc. You also have these needs that the population has. The "wealthier" nation will be the one which uses them to produce more of what its people need, and less of what they don't.
If it's more profitable to raise sheep than make wine in England, there's probably a good reason why, and you're doing all of us a service if you raise sheep. And if you raised sheep anyway, and France pays more for wool than you'd get in England, then by all means, go sell that wool in France. Then buy the wine where it's cheap and good quality with that money and sell it back in England.
Or if you want to sell your land, and there's this peasant who can only pay you 1000 pounds for it, while another one would pay 2000, then by all means sell it to the latter. Probably he has a better business plan, knows what and how to raise there that's more profitable, and in the end it's better utilization of that resource and makes us all better off. Right?
So then the same applies to the workforce. If another company can pay you more for the same work, they've probably got a better business plan and can make better use of that work. It's making us all better off if you quit your work at the one who pays less, and take the job that pays more. The same resources produces more for society, right?
That's been the theory of capitalism all along. Self-interest is what makes Adam Smith's "invisible hand" work. I mean, right?
At any rate, that's the kind of a theory that apologists of all-out cut-throat capitalism love to wave around. And it's surely used, in one way or another, when they have to justify doing something for _their_ self-interest. So then it's _weird_ to see them turn around 180 degrees and moan about these ungrateful, disloyal graduates who'll leave at the first opportunity to get a bigger wage.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right? And if the role of the corporation is solely to produce money for the shareholders, then it's _good_ to move to a corporation which has a better plan for your work and can afford to produce more with it. It's probably producing even more value for its shareholders, then.
Well, ok, that was partially tongue-in-cheek and partially taking the piss, but still... it never ceases to amuse me when people go "capitalism is good! we only have a duty to maximize our profits!" when it excuses their own actions, but demand the exact opposite (e.g., unconditional selfless loyalty) from their employees. I wish they'd make up their mind whether they want one _or_ the other.
I'll call bull. If it were just being pampered and having unrealistic expectations, you (or they) would soon discover that. You have to earn a salary _somewhere_. If you had unrealistic criteria, soon you _have_ to adjust them to more realistic levels, or starve. It's that simple.
So basically when we see half a generation starving rather than working anywhere, _then_ I'll believe your point.
Until then, it seems to me that you're moaning about simple supply and demand economics. If those guys leave, surely somewhere else they found a job more to their liking. Either it's more money, or it's better quality of life, or whatever. The fact is, _somewhere_ else they got a better offer. It means that the demand is there.
The fact is, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." That, by the way, comes from Publilius Syrus, circa 100 BC. So it's not even something invented by the new pampered generation.
If they can get someone to pay what you consider to be a fair price for their work, the fact is, it wasn't an unrealistic expectation after all. It was exactly worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it.
And let's get into another aspect. The golden rule, much as I've noticed it being the darling of some of the most obnoxious PHBs I've ever met, is just wishful thinking and misses the point. Some idiot unilaterally having the right to make the rules, that was 1000 years ago. Now the whole market theory says it's a negotiation. One side might have more leverage there, but at least ideally _both_ sides make the rules.
You may have the gold, but that doesn't give you the right to go to a store and say, "I want that computer for 1$. I have more money than you, so I make the rules. My rule is that everything I buy costs 1$. Now obey, you peon." Well, it doesn't work that way. You may have the money, but the other side also gets to decide what their product is worth. You might be able to negotiate a price that's good for _both_, or they might decide that your price isn't worth their product, and not deal with you at all. You don't just get to tell someone to suck it up and give you whatever you want, for whatever price you want, just because you have the money and you make the rules.
The same applies to the workforce market. You're buying someone else's work. Either you negotiate a price that both can live with, or maybe you don't deal at all. But saying that anyone gets to unilaterally make the rules because they have the money... just doesn't work that way.
And let's get into something else: even the gold alone isn't everything. Everything extra someone wants from me has its own price. If he want me to program, ok, that costs X dollars a month. If he wants overtime, that'll cost extra, one way or another, because if you ask for more work you should also pay more. It's just like trying to get two litres of milk instead of one: no, you're not getting the second one for free. Unless the job did pay twice as much as a similar 40-hours-a-week job, then the payment might not be worth the work after all. If he _also_ wants me to humour his wannabe-dictator "who has the gold makes the rules" ego-trips, well, that costs a lot extra. If he stresses me more than strictly necessary, that costs extra too. Etc.
It's give and take. Different products have different prices. If you want more from me, it costs more. Or to put it the other way around, the more undesirable you make that job, the more it will cost to keep me there.
That's another aspect that wannabe PHB's don't seem to get. They pretend that money is everything, they paid the standard entry wage, now surely their acting like arseholes shouldn't enter that equation too. Well, it does. It changes the product they're trying to buy, hence it changes the price.
I see a lot of people moving to other jobs completely because they reach the conclusion that, frankly, it's not worth it.
Again, you could lament their being pampered pansies, but the fact is that they end up doing _some_ job. So
Whoa, you mean it could be used to find the facials in security camera feeds too? Hmm, damn, do you think it's too late to change career track to the guy watching those feeds?
Well, not really. Even an ideal heat pump could only push the energy from here to there. More realistic ones however produce some heat of their own.
That's right. Your fridge doesn't just move energy from inside to the radiator outside, it actually dissipate a little extra heat of its own. If you left the fridge door open, it would actually heat the kitchen a little. An air conditioner, ditto, that electricity it uses has to go somewhere, which means heating the outside air. It's no different for a Peltier. They actually produce quite a bit of heat in the process.
The only value of a heat pump is that it can pump it against the natural flow. It can move some heat from a cooler place (e.g., the inside of the fridge) to a warmer place (e.g., a warm kitchen while you're cooking.)
The Peltiers used for overclocking are, basically, used as a fridge. They can get the chip cooler than the heatsink (which actually becomes hotter as a result), and, with a powerful enough one, even below ambient temperature. Which is good for overclocking. Downside, if you get below the ambient air temperature, you get condensation, and electronics tend to not like that much.
Here they seem to want to use it just to move the heat somewhere else.
E.g., you have a really high-clocked piece of circuitry generating a lot of heat (e.g. the ALU), next to a piece of circuitry which doesn't switch as often (e.g., the cache), you can help more heat flow from the former to the latter. Downside, the chip as a whole _will_ become hotter.
E.g., at least according to the summary, they want to pump the heat to a pin to the motherboard, although, to be honest, I'm not sure exactly how much heat will a pin dissipate. If that was that great a way to get a lot of heat off the chip (remember, it must also remove the Peltier's own heat), we'd be doing that already instead of using big heatsinks. The pins aren't even going into the die anyway, but are wired to it via some more modest traces.
Actually, being in the 30's too, I'd say it's exactly the opposite image than you paint.
One thing I've eventually recognized, and struck me as very interesting, is that your own impression of how much you know doesn't depend on age, as such. If you were to plot Y = how much you think you know, vs X = how much you actually know, it would look pretty much like a Gauss curve, with a very early peek.
When you're first learning a new domain, be it programming or playing the guitar or playing Go, at first your own impression of your progress goes up almost exponentially. Tiny, trivial, new things learned seem as if you're becoming teh uber-expert fast.
Seriously. My first attempts at playing Go, made me believe that I'm the next champion at it. In reality I had barely progressed the first couple of kyu (out of about 30 kyu ranks, i.e., novice ranks, and that's before even getting into the dan range where the real skill is.)
Trying to learn an instrument was the same. I could barely do the most simple tunes, but it seemed like I'm a natural-born music genius. Surely at that rate I'll be the next super-star within a year or two.
Trying to learn programming, well, let's just say writing a 1k BASIC program seemed like I'm the programming gods' avatar and prophet. Now add some assembly and a bit of Pascal in there, and I could swear that I'm the biggest programming genius that ever walked the Earth. Sure, dad's coleagues who were writing assembly 8 hours a day for a living, just smiled and politely nodded at my one-page programs, but I was sure that that's just because they're boring old adults.
And if at this point anyone wants to answer along the lines of, "OMG, you're stupid", well, yes, in retrospect I was. But the consolation is that I'm not the only one. You can see it in a lot of other people, exactly the same. E.g., in all the schoolkids who've barely learned to pluck a few notes on a guitar, and already think they're the next rock super-star, and are already planning band tours.
At any rate, that rapid over-estimation of one's abilities comes to a peak eventually. There's a point where it seems you know almost everything (or will surely find it trivial if you ever have to deal with anything else.)
That's simply the point where you haven't yet learned how much you _don't_ know yet. You're like the village kid who's climbed the little hill outside the village, and thinks that he's at the top of the world. Simply because he doesn't even know yet that there's an Everest somewhere else.
And then it starts to gradually go down as you start to learn about all the things you don't know yet. Plus you're running out of trivial things to plough through, so that extrapolation that everything left is also trivial, no longer seems that founded.
It seems to me that a lot of people experienced that curve, and mistake it for effects of age. When in fact it's anything but. Yes, you'll be arrogant and sure you know everything when you're young, because, well, chances are you're only then reaching that peak. But if you started on another domain at 40, you'd probably experience the same curve shifted to that point. You'd reach a point at 45-50 when you think you're the super-genius on your new domain, and the whole world is doomed to worship you for ever.
Yes, your cognitive functions _will_ eventually decline, but at 33 they haven't even properly started to. You may fancy you already feel the effects of age, but that's likely all in your imagination and a bit of selective-confirmation for your own fears.
Last time I saw, for example, a curve of inventions against age, it peaked a little after 35, and it won't be until the 50's that you're back to being as much of a "genius" as in your teenage years. Other curves peaked a lot later. E.g., literary or musical masterpieces vs age peaked in the 50's and 60's respectively.
The thing about games... well, there are so many possibilities for what you think you're noticing there, that I don't even know where to
Yes, but now imagine that someone in your area uses an explosive mixture that includes sugar. To quote the Wikipedia page on ammonium nitrate/fuel oil, " It was found by the IRA, in response to using low brisance AN fertilizers, that "hot spots" can be created by blending powdered sugar into the ANFO mixture, effectively sensitizing the mixture to mining-standard prilled ammonium nitrate effectiveness in which the interaction of the detonation front with a spherical void concentrates energy. Blasting-grade AN prills are typically between 0.9 and 3.0 mm in diameter."
Now have fun explaining to the police that you bought sugar in far greater quantities than you need, just for the sake of giving it to neighbours. Especially if you're in a rural area and have bought diesel fuel (e.g., for your car or tractor) and fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate too.
Sure, they'll probably release you eventually. Or maybe not. There have been real people that landed in jail because they had been playing cards and some test found remains of nitrates on their fingers, which could have also meant they handled explosives.
But ok, let's say they release you eventually. The fact is, you've been put through a rather stressful situation, for what? Just to make a point that sugar should be free?
That's my problem with Bruce Schneier's rant. He acknowledges that you _will_ be arrested, they'll confiscate your computer, etc, when someone traces kiddie-porn traffic to your computer. And that the typical defense attorney will advise you to try to get a plea bargain (read: declare yourself guilty, even if you're not) once you've been accused of paedophilia, because the deck is very stacked against you at that point.
But he thinks they'll release you eventually, because your network was obviously open to all.
Even believing that you _will_ be set free, that'll be _months_ of stress and inconvenience. Probably expense too, because if you're about to be convicted of something like that, which will be following you around your whole life, you probably don't want to entrust your fate to the cheapest lawyer someone else could find to represent you. You'll probably want some technical expert to testify there, because otherwise the jurry _will_ be told repeatedly to think "omg, kiddie porn from his IP means it was him!!!" Etc.
And there'll be people who still think it was probably you, but you just were good at bullshitting the jurry. You might find that several newspaper and their readers have already judged you and decided you should be burned at the stake, before your case even got before the real jurry. You might find that a bunch of neighbours and village/suburb gossips are already going by the age-old adage that there is no smoke without fire.
But, ok, let's believe you'll be free after all, and your neighbours don't run you out of town anyway. But that's a few months of your life that you're not getting back. Was it worth it?
That's my whole objection.
And for what? Broadband is dirt-cheap nowadays, plus one can surf from an Internet cafe, or just go drink a coffee at some joint that offers free WiFi access to their customers. It's not like you're providing water in Sahara, or a warm shelter to Eskimos. As charitable acts go, this one ranks very low on my scale. Anyone who can afford a laptop to go wardriving with, can afford the token price to go use an Internet cafe instead. Or they can afford some data plan over their cell phone, if they don't want to still get their emails in another town. So exactly what great act of charity would I be doing there? Whose life would I be making easier?
Unless, yes, they were surfing for illegal stuff that they can't jolly well browse for in a crowded Internet cafe.
Do I want to take extra risks for _those_? Even if I were sympathetic to the plight of poor souls forced to surf for kiddie porn with a laptop over someone else's connection, which I'm actually _not_... Fuck that. I'm not going to risk _my_ arse just to provide them with yet another unsecured access point.
Ah, screw Alice. (When she grows up a bit, anyway;) Think of the packaging for those interactive porn games.
In fact, if you can make a bit of paper play sounds, heck, who needs the game there? The magazine could be its own game. Rub the girl in the photo there and hear her moan, rub her there and she... umm... sorry, gotta go to the bathroom. I'll... uh... do some brainstorming and get back to you later;)
ROFL. Well spotted. Damn well spotted. You have my heartfelt congratulations. Doubly so for making it that far into that message. Gave me quite a chuckle. I could have sworn there was an "up" in there somewhere, but apparently not.
I'm not a fan of show-business as security, and I do believe that the USA could clean up its act... a lot. So far from me to speak against that idea.
That said, believing that just because you're nice, everyone will treat you nicely... is a bit naive.
- Some people will hate you just because they're crazy and suffering from various delusions, and in their deranged mind you're the Antichrist. Sad to say, paranoid schiophrenia is very real.
- Some people are simply sociopaths and simply don't give a damn about how nice a person you are. They could hurt you worse than you can imagine on a full stomach, and still be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning. Now probably most of those wouldn't kill themselves on a plane, but (A) some might manipulate others to, and (B) you never know, some did kill themselves just to take a bunch of innocents with them, as their grand finale and exit.
- Some are having a breakdown and just want to end it all, often in a way that gets themselves remembered. Often that means shooting a bunch of shoppers or co-workers, or blowing up a school.
- Some will hate you for having a different religion, or different political affiliation, or whatever.
Etc.
I humbly submit as anecdotal support:
1. Such things as the Bath School disaster. Exactly what wrong did those children, aged 7 to 12, do to that guy? What reason did he have to blow them up? Even in his madness of blaming the government for his money problems, the children didn't really star as having done him any wrong.
2. The Unabomber. It wasn't some foreigner blowing up Americans as some act of international revenge. He was born american, to parents born american. The whole bombing campaign had been to attract attention to his deranged theory that industrialization had been a disaster for the human race. And even there, the victims weren't, dunno, people which would have been the villains even by that theory, but simply innocents to attract public attention and get his manifesto published.
3. The fact that most violence is actually sectarian. Sure, it gets the world's attention when someone from abroad blows shit up in the USA, but actually most terrorism is aimed at sects of the same religion. And a lot more terrorism than is aimed at the "evil" westerners, is aimed at terrorizing their own countrimen and neighbours and scaring them off cooperating with said "evil" westerners or off adopting western customs and ideas.
So, to cut a long story short, I would say that _only_ being nice is actually a pretty piss-poor defense. Sure, be nice, it may make it a lot harder to motivate people to blow themselves on your plane, but do be prepared to deal with the ones which aren't deterred by your just being swell guys.
The fallacy you're doing there is shifting the scales in that comparison. One side is learning Jazz at all, the other is being a _star_ in programming.
You'll find that being a star in _any_ discipline, Jazz included, isn't just a matter of being given a crash course in music notation. There are many who can learn Jazz, but there are few which are stars at it.
And there are a ton of people who just aren't any good at Jazz, no matter how much you teach them. There are those who are born tone deaf, or lack the coordination, or those who just aren't interested in a musical career, or those who find that learning uber-boring, or a dozen other cases which you just can't turn into _stars_ in any kind of music.
I'll further go and say that in Jazz (or any other kind of music) it's a relatively low pay career and with very few oportunity to become a super-star. So I'd wager that any music school gets an already filtered set of candidates. It's already those who love that genre, are sure that that's what they want to do, etc. It's already the people passionate and motivated.
In programming, we get a ton of drooling burger-flippers who think they can just get a quick training in Java and earn the big bucks. Not because they like it, not because it fits their personality type, not because they showed any kind of aptitude or inclination, just because they think they can fake their way to the big bucks. And it shows.
If you want a more apt comparison, compare them to the gang wanting to be a rock star in high school and college. The prospect of glamour and big bucks is there, and every other high-school boy wants to be in a rock band. The problem is that most suck, and will _never_ be even an acceptable player with any instrument. And aren't particularly motivated to train hard either. How many actually become a _star_? I'll say that's lost in the decimals.
So basically to sum up the comparison to Jazz:
1. Yes, you can teach Jazz. You can teach CS too. That's why we have that kind of colleges, you know.
2. You can't just take any guy off the street and turn him into a _star_ musician. If you went and took random people laid off by McDonald and tried to turn them into musicians, very few would even make an acceptable musician, and _extremely_ few will ever be considerable a _star_. Same as programming.
But, of course, that won't stop idiot PHBs from trying.
Well, for a start, I probably should apologize if anyone understood the "burger flipper" quip as singling out McDonalds' employees. As it happens the particular burger flipper I was referring to in that paragraph (and yes, he did get a real programmer fired for writing correct code he couldn't understand) is an ex-marketer.
It's more generally the complaint about anyone turned programmer with no more than a minimal course in some language, just because programming pays better, not because they actually have any inclination or aptitude. It's more that they're (still) burger flippers in the language of their choice, than whether they literally flipped burgers before. They're trained at most as unskilled manual workers.
As for the rest of your comment... well, I'll try to say it more diplomatically and constructively, but it's basically a more verbose version of what the AC already replied. Sorry.
See, thing is, programming isn't unskilled manual labour at any level. Whether you're designing the grand architecture of a whole enterprise system, or just the innards of a helper function, it's design and engineering work. So saying that someone should just teach you the language, but not the engineering principles, is a recipe for disaster that's been repeated too many times.
It's like saying that you should just teach someone how to use a wrench and a hammer, and then ask them to build you a custom car from scratch. Regardless of how hard management wishes that it were just a matter of mechanical work with those tools, it isn't. That guy may be able to hammer sheet metal like the best of them, but if he doesn't understand combustion engines, he'll still produce crap. Both performance-wise and safety-wise.
And that's just the mistake repeated in programming again and again and again. There's a ton of _horrible_ code out there, and a lot of security holes repeated verbatim again and again. (E.g., not only I see the same cross-site-scripting and SQL injection vulnerabilities repeated ten thousand times verbatim, but occasionally I even run into idiots arguing that they're overrated and inevitable anyway.) Because yet another guy didn't even understand the principles behind it, and didn't even know such basic stuff as how to quote a string for use on a site or in the database.
Please don't take that (necessarily) as an insult, but as an explanation of _why_ you need that engineering stuff. Because you _are_ doing engineering work. I'm not saying "go back to McDonalds", I'm saying, "do learn more and you'll be better at your job." Your choice whether you want to follow that advice, though.
1. Java likes to pretend that it doesn't have pointers, although it's a necessary concept. So a lot of people end up doing those kinky mental convolutions to remember when pass by value isn't really by value, instead of just learning (or teaching) pointers.
2. I think people need to be exposed to _explicitly_ using pointers, before relaxing the requirements to the hidden pointers of Java. You can't really understand something that you only heard about once, then never used. If it's just mentioned once in a lecture, and that's that, you'll promptly forget it. To really hammer in the concept of what a pointer is, and how it really works, you have to really write those asterisks and ampersands a few times and understand why you've put them, what they do, and what happens there.
Just as an extra anecdote and illustration of what happens when such people finally get told about pointers (but still don't quite "get it"): one team's architect actually told everyone to use "Integer" instead of "int" in method definitions everywhere, because it's faster! See, it copies only a pointer instead of the whole int!
Yeah, that guy was quite a bit less than a Michelangelo.
Yes, abstraction is key to tackling complexity. But equally, having no clue what happens behind that pretty Java code is the key to writing bad code and spending time debugging what you shouldn't even worry about.
Guess what? Even in Java, pointers still come to bite you in the arse when you least expect them. I see people every day who have trouble understanding the difference between "==" and "equals()" in Java, because they never learned the pointers behind them. They're essentially one abstraction level too far from understanding what their own code is doing.
Or even in Java learning why you can't modify an "int" parameter, but you can modify the contents of an "int[]" parameter, guess what? Requires pointers. People end up doing all sorts of unnatural metal contortions to remember when passing by value isn't really passing by value, when "it's a pointer" would sum it up perfectly.
And it shows. I've had people come to me half a dozen times with basically the same idiotic "auugh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value, and when I look into its array with a debugger it replaced my old one!" When in fact, it was only added a node to the front of the linked list. But they don't know what a linked list is, nor what a hash table really is, nor how a Node can contain another Node, without a concept of pointers. Worse yet, not only I see them spending a week debugging Hashtable, I see piss-poor workarounds done to prevent it from doing its job.
Or I see burger-flippers-turned-programmers occasionally get the real programmers fired for doing the right thing. Like using a "==" where it's correct to use it. But the burger flipper doesn't understand that. He learned some "for String use equals()" mantra, and he'll apply it and preach it, cargo-cult style, without even understanding what he's _doing_.
Or I see people think that optimization means replacing two lines with a one line call, because they have no fucking clue what the machine does with that code. They think that speed is measured in lines of code, because noone explained to them otherwise. So they wonder why their replacing two ifs with a catch is actually slower. (And I'm not getting into the many ways such a catch can make the code less secure, for example, by assuming that a real exception is just their loop reaching the end of the array.) Exactly what throwing an exception does, is a mystery to them.
Etc.
No, noone said you must keep programming in "a language where even K&R wrote unsafe code, nor that difficulty equals worthiness. But it helps to be at least exposed to those concepts once, even if thereafter you go on to program in Java or VB for the rest of your days. The fact that you worked with pointers once in C and managed to get them right, _will_ show in your Java code too.
Probably the best thing that helped my coding was doing assembly on my parents' old home computer, back in high school. In fact, in hex, because that ZX-81 with 1k RAM didn't even have enough RAM for an assembler. Wrap your mind around _that_, if you think C is too hard.
Would I advise anyone to write a production program in assembly nowadays? Nope, God forbid. I wouldn't have advised writing a whole program in assembly even back then. But understanding the machine behind that high level stuff will show even in your Java code.
And, yes, not every architect needs to be a Michelangelo. But it helps if they're not a clueless moron who can't even build a doghouse right. You can see plenty of architects nowadays who can't even get a basic house right. They know how to draw an artsy sketch of a house, but they have no clue how to calculate it to actually stand upright or what materials to use so it doesn't get damaged by rain within a year or two. And/or need a civil engineer to fix their elementary mistakes. Maybe it wouldn't hurt that much if they knew a bit more, ya know?
I mean, by that line of reasoning, working around a virtual farm doesn't sound that exciting either, but Harvest Moon did just that. Let you run around the farm, shear the sheep and brush your horse. I'd guess it must have sold enough copies to make it worth porting to most consoles that ever existed.
An even more bizarre, and I would dare say _disturbing_, concept is Boong-Ga Boong-Ga. The Japanese arcade game where you get to shove a giant plastic finger in what looks like the plastic arse of someone bent over. And watch their face as they scream in pain. And then get your virility and sexual behaviour judged by how brutal an anal probing you gave the poor bugger(ed).
I'm not sure how that would translate even to the Wii, because thrusting the wiimote at thin air must be, at a wild guess, not quite the same as shoving it into someone.
The Japanese also seem to have these interesting game concepts, like driving a big truck... while staying under the legal limit, obeying all the traffic rules, and avoiding causing any damage to your truck or someone else's property. Break too many rules and you're fired. Does that sound exciting? Well, they too didn't think us gaijin would find it exciting, because in the USA version they turned it on its head. Cause enough mayhem and you get a bonus.
So, well, don't be too quick to dismiss the concept. I'm sure some people will find it hilarious to flip pancakes with the wiimote, and stir in a pot with it.
I don't understand them, but, hey, they probably wouldn't understand why I'm posting on Slashdot from home at 1 AM either.
Actually, if this wasn't already part of a PR coup, it will become one very soon. "Scientist proves that diamonds are the prettiest existing crystals" is a great way to remind people to buy diamonds, and give them a good excuse for conspicuous consumption too.
The part about another crystal which could theoretically be as pretty, only it doesn't exist (and, as another poster noted, can't possibly exist because electrons aren't shared that way, plus it would be opaque) is just that extra bit of "science" to make it easier to swallow. It lets people feel that they've connected the dots themselves to reach your conclusion.
I mean, "scientist proves that diamonds are the prettiest possible thing in the universe" is a superlative, plus you're feeding people your message a bit heavy handed. Some will resist it. "Scientist proves that only one thing could be prettier, except it doesn't exist in nature" lets people go, "haha, silly scientist, but in the meantime, out of the things one can actually buy, diamonds are the prettiest, right?" Only now it's their own conclusion, and they won't fight it. In fact, they'll feel all smug and smart about it.
Sad to say, that's how PR works.
PR isn't marketing. PR is marketing's evil stealthy brother. It loves to masquerade as news, science studies, etc. Marketing plants the seeds, but PR ploughs your mind first.
Marketing just goes and tells you "Buy Mars chocolate bars, they're great." PR comes and tells you, "Scientists prove that chocolate is good for you! Valuable enzymes found in cocoa beans!" (Except, what they don't tell you, those enzymes are no longer present in chocolate.) That was an actual PR stunt sponsored by Mars.
Marketing just tells you "The suit is back! Buy Men's Warehouse suits, they look all professional and stuff!" PR goes and tells you "The suit is back! Here's a ton of interviews with managers swearing that they'd never hire someone who doesn't wear a business suit 24/7." That was an actual PR stunt debunked that was linked to even on Slashdot.
So, anyway, they write some piece of news and then carpet bomb sites and newspapers with it. A lot of newspapers, especially local ones, are even happy to just print whatever PR sends them, because it's written well and it's more interesting than local "raccoon found in Mr Smith's car" stuff. So pretty much any PR agency can get you in those. A really good one can get you on TV and on Reuters. Those tend to be a lot more expensive.
And faked scientific studies aren't new stuff either. A _lot_ of PR stuff is published as stuff backed by science and (pseudo)maths. The way that goes is, some PR hack writes some pseudo-science babble. It doesn't have to make any sense. It can add different units, or claim that a theoretical crystal is pretty when the electron structure would make it a metal, and thus look like Tin. It doesn't matter. If you can spot that, you're not in their target demographic anyway. Then it starts fishing for people with a Dr or Prof title who'll sign it. A lot say "fuck off", but eventually one has nothing to lose, noone takes him seriously anyway, and he could use the money. He'll take the pie in the face for their money.
Now I'm not saying that this particular paper is necessarily PR. It could be, but it also could be just someone who wanted to see his name in a journal. But even if it wasn't written as PR for the diamond cartel, that cartel could very easily use it as PR if they need some. Far from sending someone to kill him, they're probably happy right now.
Well, more power to him if he can survive on that kind of ideals, but the fact is: the business world doesn't work like that. Corporations are pretty much _supposed_ to do that. If they can make more bucks for their shareholders, the same company is _supposed_ to simultaneously try to sell you some chips (undercutting some other potential supplier) and then go and try to undercut the computers you make with those chips.
If you look at some of the major players, they're doing it all the time.
E.g., IBM goes and partners with AMD and sells them some fab capacity, then goes and sells and promotes computers with Intel CPUs. Then it goes and tries to get people to buy its own Power blades and mainframes instead of stuff from either AMD or Intel. Basically it actively advertises, and sends salesmen to companies, to hammer in the message, "buy our own super-duper Power stuff, PCs aren't any good as servers."
E.g., Oracle goes and partners with IBM, and appears on stage at launches and proclaims its undying love for IBM platforms, then goes and advertises, "don't buy DB/2, buy an Oracle database. Look in how many ways DB/2 sucks compared to our database in the latest benchmarks. Oh, and while you're at it, buy our own application server instead of WebSphere. And BTW, our benchmark was on cheap commodity PCs too, not on those sucky expensive IBM things."
E.g., the same Oracle goes and plays Red Hat's best buddy and all committed to that platform, then comes and tries to steal Red Hat's Linux support business. You know, get Red Hat's work in putting together that distro for free, but don't repay them with a support contract. Come get your support from us instead.
Etc.
_That_ is how the business world works.
Again, I realize that if a physical person did the same, they'd lose all their friends and maybe end up in a mental hospital. But companies actually do that all the time, and their investors expect them to act like that.
If you have moral objections to that kind of behaviour, good, try to have the laws changed. But in the meantime it's naive of Negroponte to expect that if Intel does some business with him, then Intel is his faithful and loyal serf for eternity. _If_ he actually expects that.
So basically they're a normal corporation, acting perfectly normally to create more value for its shareholders, eh?
I mean, just like, say, Sun during Scott McNealy's CEO days, going "we love Linux and OSS" in the morning and "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" in the evening of the same day? Or like IBM showing up at Athlon launches and proclaiming its undying love for AMD, then spending 100 million on developping an Intel-only chipset that nearly negated the advantage of AMD's IMC and hypertransport? Or like AOL using Netscape to negotiate a big subsidy from MS, essentially a huge corporate bribe to use IE instead of Netscape, then suing MS for anti-competitive behaviour against Netscape? Etc.
Sad to say, that's just normal behaviour for corporations. Someone showing up at your product launches is more of a way for _them_ to be in the public's eye, than really meaning that they won't backstab you the next day.
What's normal for normal people, isn't normal at all for corporations and viceversa. If someone acted like a corporation and showed up to proclaim his undying friendship in the morning, then tried to lead a mob with torches and pitchforks to your home in the evening, chances are we'd put them in a mental institution. But conversely, if a corporation tried to stay your best friend even if it loses them money, the shareholders would want heads to roll.
To be entirely fair, though, it's also a mistake to see a corporation as one monolythic entity with only one brain. Just because department X thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread, doesn't mean that department Y won't try to backstab you. Sometimes even just because the manager of department X really just wants to undermine the manager of department Y.
In some cases they even backstab each other. See, for example, the sad story of OS/2. One department developed it as an alternative to paying the Windows tax to MS. Another department refused to ship IBM computers with OS/2 installed, because they could get a bigger discount on Windows if they're MS-only on the computers they sell.
Don't try to understand internal corporate politics, that-a-way lies madness of Lovecraft proportions.
Actually, you're onto something there, but IMHO that quote really just illustrates the fact that men are more likely to relate to another man's view of women. It's because both have the same stereotypes and wishful-thinking ideas, while reality often tends to not quite fit that.
So, yes, if Jack Nicholson describes women as the men's stereotype of women, including the illogical and unaccountable part, other men will find it a perfect portrayal of women.
It's not even something new. In medieval Japan the justification of why only men are allowed to play women roles in Kabuki theatre was... that supposedly women are too close to feminity to play it accurately. At first read it sounds like a major WTF. If they're closer to feminity, wouldn't that make them _more_ believable in a woman's role? Well not unless you also consider the audience: for men. A real woman wouldn't fit the male audience's stereotypes and prejudices as well as a man playing those stereotypes. Those guys came to see their stereotypical medieval woman image, all airhead, submissive and utterly unable to even exist without a Real Man lording over her. They want to see someone embodying that stereotype to the letter, and sometimes melodramatically, not someone showing the quirks of a real woman.
Or you can see the same phenomenon on MUDs and, to some extent, MMOs. Men pretending to be women are quite often more believed in that role, than the real women. Believed by other men, that is. Because they fit the audience's distorted notions better than the real thing does.
Yes, there are also the ones dancing naked in the Stormwind fountain. But just because _some_ people are unable to play a stereotype well, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work for more talented authors and actors.
Just to be entirely fair, though, I suppose the opposite should also be true. A man portrayed by a woman should probably also be more believable to other women, than the real thing.
I've actually had the mis-fortune of seeing a few romance movies, and the guys were portrayed as far from the real thing as you can get without adding tentacles and bug eyes. Whether it was Mr Perfect wooing the heroine or the henchman or whatever, those just fell somewhere in _my_ uncanny valley. They acted disturbingly not quite like real men. The actors may have been biologically male, but the role wasn't. But apparently the core demographic for that kind of thing doesn't have their suspension of disbelief tripped.
Heh... so basically you're saying that it started as a pervert's and misogynist's substitute for porn. Even the sophistry about a female's role and strength being reduced to obedience and modesty isn't entirely a new philosophical concept, it's pretty much standard misogynistic stuff.
Well, gee, I guess you illustrate perfectly why women didn't really take her as a role model.
If Sony thought that everyone who can't find a PS2, will go buy a PS3, yeah, they would have killed it already. Unfortunately, even from a position of monopoly (which Sony doesn't have), that's still not an easy stunt to pull. See MS's trouble convincing people to get Vista instead of XP.
In practice, if they couldn't buy a PS2 any more, a lot of people would do one of the following:
- go buy an XBox or Wii instead. (So Sony would be sacrificing their profits for the sake of raising MS's or Nintendo's.)
- if it was bought as a Christmas gift for some friend or relative, they'd go buy some other toy instead. (Same as above.)
- get told to use an emulator to play the PS2 games they want to play. (And emulators are one thing that make Sony nervous, for a variety of reasons. Not all of them retarded.)
Etc.
Ditto for developers. A lot of people already bought the tools and got the know-how for PS2 games. If they'd rather make another PS2 game and you don't want to publish it, it's not guaranteed that they'll move on to the PS3. Some might figure out that if they have to learn new stuff and buy new tools anyway, they might as well do it for the best-selling console, not for the PS3.
Plus there is some trickle effect in old games bought. Everyone who buys a PS2 might go and grab a copy of some Final Fantasy game or Gran Turismo or whatever. There are a _lot_ of PS2 games which Sony already paid for, and even if they get a 5$ profit off selling a half-price copy, it's still more than nothing.
Ya know, I'm already fairly tired of "Top X Worst Y" types of list, that seem to serve the only purpose of showing that the author can talk smack. Generally. But this one is the most brain-dead and clueless I've seen in years. And yes, I did RTFA, but I'll use you summary just because I'm too lazy to write my own.
1. The Phrase "Next-Gen". (It's not "next gen" until the PS4.)
This is the only one which actually has a point, so I thought I'd give it a nod before moving on to the real offenders. Though even here, good luck getting marketers to quit using meaningless buzzwords.
2. "Halo 3". (Similar to the above, Halo is done, the fight is finished, no need to refer to the version anymore.)
Actually, IMHO your summary here is slightly inexact. What he demands is that they stop hyping and advertising Halo 3, and start hyping again when they release Halo 4. He has nothing against the version number, and his expecting a Halo 4 kinda doesn't imply that he sees the fight as finished. He's just tired of hearing about Halo 3.
Well, sadly
A) that's just capitalism in action. If MS thinks they can still sell Halo 3, how's that different from still advertising last year's model of car, or last year's CD of some band?
B) that advertising pays for some other things he's getting cheaper or for free. E.g., since the site name seems to imply having something to do with MTV, I'd like to see how MTV would survive without massive advertising. All those music videos are, effectively, advertising for whichever band the recording companies manufactured this year.
3. Bad Virtual Console Releases. (Referring to Nintendo.)
WTF? It's not like it even costs much to release a ROM for an emulator. But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot.
Plus, here's the fun part: not everyone has the same tastes. What's crap for him and he doesn't want re-released, could be someone else's nostalgia moment. Even something like "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," well, why not? Some mom or dad might think that that's useful for their 6 year old.
4. Game Delays. (I'm with him in hating delays, but good luck on that one.)
Now this is truly brain dead. Those delays don't happen as some premeditated marketing ploy, they happen because people are bad at guessing the future. The fact is, even if you could know exactly how much code you'll need to write (you don't), and exactly how long it would take to _write_ it, you can't guess what bugs you'll have to fix. Therefore, nor how much time you'll spend fixing those.
Then there are the inevitable design changes. Some things it's easier to just see how it looks in the game, before you decide how you'll do it. Some things sound good in theory, but you'll find out that they suck when you sic the playtesters on it. Etc.
Sure, there are ways to make things more maintainable and reduce the surprises, but even that isn't 100% bullet proof. And good luck with getting the game industry to follow best practices anyway. Especially when:
A) you have the publisher telling you that it _has_ to be ready within X months and Y dollars, you just don't have the time or budget for UML diagrams and funky frameworks, and
B) you have to push the edge in terms of graphics and whatnot (because screenshots sell), but still have a finite budget of CPU cycles and GPU gigatexels/second, and you know everyone will moan if the frame rate is even 1 less FPS than in another similar game. So, you know, you end up doing evil hacks just to meet those constraints.
Seriously, short of hideously overestimating (which the publisher will reject from the start) or being able to see in the future, it just won't happen.
Well, that much is clear. And I'm certainly not proposing to stop people from getting what they want.
The question was, sorta, when did people start wanting to be stupid, and why? When did it become fashionable to have the intellectual and cultural horizon of a midget in a well?
I'm not even as much asking about the news, as such. That is IMHO effect, rather than cause. As you were saying, people get the news they want to get. And I could even live happily with them getting some brainless entertainment -- news or otherwise -- for a couple of hours a day, if they still used their brains the rest of the time.
But that's just my problem: when they turn off that TV or log off from those gossip sites, they go on to try to be even _more_ stupid IRL. For some people, when they take a break from their circle of RL friends and turn on the TV, their IQ actually goes up one notch. On those TV news they might even accidentally learn that there's a war in Iraq, or that some weird place called Africa even exists, or some trivia. But then they go to their RL circle of friends and it's time for another round of, "oh, I'm too stupid for computers... and I'm too stupid for geography too, and I'm too stupid to have an opinion about Iraq, and generally, little old me has trouble even figuring out which shoe goes on the left foot in less than 2-3 tries. Each day."
Even that gossip and trivia they heard about on TV, are promptly discarded unless they're in the commonly-agreed fashionably brainless set, so as not to make their friends feel inadequate.
Slashdot Mirror
Buddy, I don't see anywhere there saying that it's adjusted for inflation, so I'll assume it's not. And that makes those numbers illustrate quite the opposite: that lot of Americans were actually impoverished in that time.
I don't know the exact numbers for the whole almost 30 years, so let's pull a number out of the butt. Let's say the average inflation in that time was 2%. Well, my xcalc says that 1.02^30=1.81. So one dollar back then will be about 1.8$ right now. Or viceversa 1 / 1.8 = 0.55, or 1$ right now is 55% of what it was back then.
(The numbers vary quite quickly with the exact number of the average inflation there, btw. E.g., an increase of only from 2.0% to 2.5% changes the final result from 1.8 to over 2.4. And I'd expect the reality to be actually more in line with that, since, frankly, the dollar's value dropped to half in the last few years alone. But let's go with that conservative estimate for now.)
So if you're telling me that the percentage of americans which were under 30,000 back then is the same as right now, you're effectively telling me that the effective salary of that population segment dropped by 45%. (From 100% to 55%.)
Yes, you could say that now more people are in dual-income households, but that's just saying that now two people must work to earn effectively the same salary as one person back then. That's not an improvement, sorry. Needing to work twice for effectively about the same wage isn't an improvement.
Or you're telling me that back then 12% were earning more than $100,000 in 1979 money, while now 24% earn more than $55,000 in 1979 money. Well, blimey, probably the same was the case in 1979 too, if not better. If you did the equivalent and said, "how many earn more than $180,000 nowadays?" I don't know the result, but I wouldn't be that surprised if it was actually lower than 12%. I don't know of that horribly many jobs which are in _that_ bracket.
That's not "woohoo, cut-throat corporatism is making us all richer." It's a scary picture of it making a heck of a lot of people poorer.
I'm not going to disagree with you at all. If I'm allowed a small addition, I'd add why that's even a good thing.
See, the whole idea behind capitalism, going all the way to Adam Smith, is that it essentially optimizes using the resources we have, to create the things we actually need. You have X million people, Y million acres of land, etc. You also have these needs that the population has. The "wealthier" nation will be the one which uses them to produce more of what its people need, and less of what they don't.
If it's more profitable to raise sheep than make wine in England, there's probably a good reason why, and you're doing all of us a service if you raise sheep. And if you raised sheep anyway, and France pays more for wool than you'd get in England, then by all means, go sell that wool in France. Then buy the wine where it's cheap and good quality with that money and sell it back in England.
Or if you want to sell your land, and there's this peasant who can only pay you 1000 pounds for it, while another one would pay 2000, then by all means sell it to the latter. Probably he has a better business plan, knows what and how to raise there that's more profitable, and in the end it's better utilization of that resource and makes us all better off. Right?
So then the same applies to the workforce. If another company can pay you more for the same work, they've probably got a better business plan and can make better use of that work. It's making us all better off if you quit your work at the one who pays less, and take the job that pays more. The same resources produces more for society, right?
That's been the theory of capitalism all along. Self-interest is what makes Adam Smith's "invisible hand" work. I mean, right?
At any rate, that's the kind of a theory that apologists of all-out cut-throat capitalism love to wave around. And it's surely used, in one way or another, when they have to justify doing something for _their_ self-interest. So then it's _weird_ to see them turn around 180 degrees and moan about these ungrateful, disloyal graduates who'll leave at the first opportunity to get a bigger wage.
You'd think they'd be _thrilled_ to see the younger generation apply the same kind of capitalism all the way. I mean, surely, if cut-throat capitalism is good for us all, then people using the same principles in their job hunt are, well, nothing short of _patriotic_, right? And if the role of the corporation is solely to produce money for the shareholders, then it's _good_ to move to a corporation which has a better plan for your work and can afford to produce more with it. It's probably producing even more value for its shareholders, then.
Well, ok, that was partially tongue-in-cheek and partially taking the piss, but still... it never ceases to amuse me when people go "capitalism is good! we only have a duty to maximize our profits!" when it excuses their own actions, but demand the exact opposite (e.g., unconditional selfless loyalty) from their employees. I wish they'd make up their mind whether they want one _or_ the other.
I'll call bull. If it were just being pampered and having unrealistic expectations, you (or they) would soon discover that. You have to earn a salary _somewhere_. If you had unrealistic criteria, soon you _have_ to adjust them to more realistic levels, or starve. It's that simple.
So basically when we see half a generation starving rather than working anywhere, _then_ I'll believe your point.
Until then, it seems to me that you're moaning about simple supply and demand economics. If those guys leave, surely somewhere else they found a job more to their liking. Either it's more money, or it's better quality of life, or whatever. The fact is, _somewhere_ else they got a better offer. It means that the demand is there.
The fact is, "Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." That, by the way, comes from Publilius Syrus, circa 100 BC. So it's not even something invented by the new pampered generation.
If they can get someone to pay what you consider to be a fair price for their work, the fact is, it wasn't an unrealistic expectation after all. It was exactly worth what its purchaser is willing to pay for it.
And let's get into another aspect. The golden rule, much as I've noticed it being the darling of some of the most obnoxious PHBs I've ever met, is just wishful thinking and misses the point. Some idiot unilaterally having the right to make the rules, that was 1000 years ago. Now the whole market theory says it's a negotiation. One side might have more leverage there, but at least ideally _both_ sides make the rules.
You may have the gold, but that doesn't give you the right to go to a store and say, "I want that computer for 1$. I have more money than you, so I make the rules. My rule is that everything I buy costs 1$. Now obey, you peon." Well, it doesn't work that way. You may have the money, but the other side also gets to decide what their product is worth. You might be able to negotiate a price that's good for _both_, or they might decide that your price isn't worth their product, and not deal with you at all. You don't just get to tell someone to suck it up and give you whatever you want, for whatever price you want, just because you have the money and you make the rules.
The same applies to the workforce market. You're buying someone else's work. Either you negotiate a price that both can live with, or maybe you don't deal at all. But saying that anyone gets to unilaterally make the rules because they have the money... just doesn't work that way.
And let's get into something else: even the gold alone isn't everything. Everything extra someone wants from me has its own price. If he want me to program, ok, that costs X dollars a month. If he wants overtime, that'll cost extra, one way or another, because if you ask for more work you should also pay more. It's just like trying to get two litres of milk instead of one: no, you're not getting the second one for free. Unless the job did pay twice as much as a similar 40-hours-a-week job, then the payment might not be worth the work after all. If he _also_ wants me to humour his wannabe-dictator "who has the gold makes the rules" ego-trips, well, that costs a lot extra. If he stresses me more than strictly necessary, that costs extra too. Etc.
It's give and take. Different products have different prices. If you want more from me, it costs more. Or to put it the other way around, the more undesirable you make that job, the more it will cost to keep me there.
That's another aspect that wannabe PHB's don't seem to get. They pretend that money is everything, they paid the standard entry wage, now surely their acting like arseholes shouldn't enter that equation too. Well, it does. It changes the product they're trying to buy, hence it changes the price.
I see a lot of people moving to other jobs completely because they reach the conclusion that, frankly, it's not worth it.
Again, you could lament their being pampered pansies, but the fact is that they end up doing _some_ job. So
Whoa, you mean it could be used to find the facials in security camera feeds too? Hmm, damn, do you think it's too late to change career track to the guy watching those feeds?
Well, not really. Even an ideal heat pump could only push the energy from here to there. More realistic ones however produce some heat of their own.
That's right. Your fridge doesn't just move energy from inside to the radiator outside, it actually dissipate a little extra heat of its own. If you left the fridge door open, it would actually heat the kitchen a little. An air conditioner, ditto, that electricity it uses has to go somewhere, which means heating the outside air. It's no different for a Peltier. They actually produce quite a bit of heat in the process.
The only value of a heat pump is that it can pump it against the natural flow. It can move some heat from a cooler place (e.g., the inside of the fridge) to a warmer place (e.g., a warm kitchen while you're cooking.)
The Peltiers used for overclocking are, basically, used as a fridge. They can get the chip cooler than the heatsink (which actually becomes hotter as a result), and, with a powerful enough one, even below ambient temperature. Which is good for overclocking. Downside, if you get below the ambient air temperature, you get condensation, and electronics tend to not like that much.
Here they seem to want to use it just to move the heat somewhere else.
E.g., you have a really high-clocked piece of circuitry generating a lot of heat (e.g. the ALU), next to a piece of circuitry which doesn't switch as often (e.g., the cache), you can help more heat flow from the former to the latter. Downside, the chip as a whole _will_ become hotter.
E.g., at least according to the summary, they want to pump the heat to a pin to the motherboard, although, to be honest, I'm not sure exactly how much heat will a pin dissipate. If that was that great a way to get a lot of heat off the chip (remember, it must also remove the Peltier's own heat), we'd be doing that already instead of using big heatsinks. The pins aren't even going into the die anyway, but are wired to it via some more modest traces.
Actually, being in the 30's too, I'd say it's exactly the opposite image than you paint.
One thing I've eventually recognized, and struck me as very interesting, is that your own impression of how much you know doesn't depend on age, as such. If you were to plot Y = how much you think you know, vs X = how much you actually know, it would look pretty much like a Gauss curve, with a very early peek.
When you're first learning a new domain, be it programming or playing the guitar or playing Go, at first your own impression of your progress goes up almost exponentially. Tiny, trivial, new things learned seem as if you're becoming teh uber-expert fast.
Seriously. My first attempts at playing Go, made me believe that I'm the next champion at it. In reality I had barely progressed the first couple of kyu (out of about 30 kyu ranks, i.e., novice ranks, and that's before even getting into the dan range where the real skill is.)
Trying to learn an instrument was the same. I could barely do the most simple tunes, but it seemed like I'm a natural-born music genius. Surely at that rate I'll be the next super-star within a year or two.
Trying to learn programming, well, let's just say writing a 1k BASIC program seemed like I'm the programming gods' avatar and prophet. Now add some assembly and a bit of Pascal in there, and I could swear that I'm the biggest programming genius that ever walked the Earth. Sure, dad's coleagues who were writing assembly 8 hours a day for a living, just smiled and politely nodded at my one-page programs, but I was sure that that's just because they're boring old adults.
And if at this point anyone wants to answer along the lines of, "OMG, you're stupid", well, yes, in retrospect I was. But the consolation is that I'm not the only one. You can see it in a lot of other people, exactly the same. E.g., in all the schoolkids who've barely learned to pluck a few notes on a guitar, and already think they're the next rock super-star, and are already planning band tours.
At any rate, that rapid over-estimation of one's abilities comes to a peak eventually. There's a point where it seems you know almost everything (or will surely find it trivial if you ever have to deal with anything else.)
That's simply the point where you haven't yet learned how much you _don't_ know yet. You're like the village kid who's climbed the little hill outside the village, and thinks that he's at the top of the world. Simply because he doesn't even know yet that there's an Everest somewhere else.
And then it starts to gradually go down as you start to learn about all the things you don't know yet. Plus you're running out of trivial things to plough through, so that extrapolation that everything left is also trivial, no longer seems that founded.
It seems to me that a lot of people experienced that curve, and mistake it for effects of age. When in fact it's anything but. Yes, you'll be arrogant and sure you know everything when you're young, because, well, chances are you're only then reaching that peak. But if you started on another domain at 40, you'd probably experience the same curve shifted to that point. You'd reach a point at 45-50 when you think you're the super-genius on your new domain, and the whole world is doomed to worship you for ever.
Yes, your cognitive functions _will_ eventually decline, but at 33 they haven't even properly started to. You may fancy you already feel the effects of age, but that's likely all in your imagination and a bit of selective-confirmation for your own fears.
Last time I saw, for example, a curve of inventions against age, it peaked a little after 35, and it won't be until the 50's that you're back to being as much of a "genius" as in your teenage years. Other curves peaked a lot later. E.g., literary or musical masterpieces vs age peaked in the 50's and 60's respectively.
The thing about games... well, there are so many possibilities for what you think you're noticing there, that I don't even know where to
Yes, but now imagine that someone in your area uses an explosive mixture that includes sugar. To quote the Wikipedia page on ammonium nitrate/fuel oil, " It was found by the IRA, in response to using low brisance AN fertilizers, that "hot spots" can be created by blending powdered sugar into the ANFO mixture, effectively sensitizing the mixture to mining-standard prilled ammonium nitrate effectiveness in which the interaction of the detonation front with a spherical void concentrates energy. Blasting-grade AN prills are typically between 0.9 and 3.0 mm in diameter."
Now have fun explaining to the police that you bought sugar in far greater quantities than you need, just for the sake of giving it to neighbours. Especially if you're in a rural area and have bought diesel fuel (e.g., for your car or tractor) and fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate too.
Sure, they'll probably release you eventually. Or maybe not. There have been real people that landed in jail because they had been playing cards and some test found remains of nitrates on their fingers, which could have also meant they handled explosives.
But ok, let's say they release you eventually. The fact is, you've been put through a rather stressful situation, for what? Just to make a point that sugar should be free?
That's my problem with Bruce Schneier's rant. He acknowledges that you _will_ be arrested, they'll confiscate your computer, etc, when someone traces kiddie-porn traffic to your computer. And that the typical defense attorney will advise you to try to get a plea bargain (read: declare yourself guilty, even if you're not) once you've been accused of paedophilia, because the deck is very stacked against you at that point.
But he thinks they'll release you eventually, because your network was obviously open to all.
Even believing that you _will_ be set free, that'll be _months_ of stress and inconvenience. Probably expense too, because if you're about to be convicted of something like that, which will be following you around your whole life, you probably don't want to entrust your fate to the cheapest lawyer someone else could find to represent you. You'll probably want some technical expert to testify there, because otherwise the jurry _will_ be told repeatedly to think "omg, kiddie porn from his IP means it was him!!!" Etc.
And there'll be people who still think it was probably you, but you just were good at bullshitting the jurry. You might find that several newspaper and their readers have already judged you and decided you should be burned at the stake, before your case even got before the real jurry. You might find that a bunch of neighbours and village/suburb gossips are already going by the age-old adage that there is no smoke without fire.
But, ok, let's believe you'll be free after all, and your neighbours don't run you out of town anyway. But that's a few months of your life that you're not getting back. Was it worth it?
That's my whole objection.
And for what? Broadband is dirt-cheap nowadays, plus one can surf from an Internet cafe, or just go drink a coffee at some joint that offers free WiFi access to their customers. It's not like you're providing water in Sahara, or a warm shelter to Eskimos. As charitable acts go, this one ranks very low on my scale. Anyone who can afford a laptop to go wardriving with, can afford the token price to go use an Internet cafe instead. Or they can afford some data plan over their cell phone, if they don't want to still get their emails in another town. So exactly what great act of charity would I be doing there? Whose life would I be making easier?
Unless, yes, they were surfing for illegal stuff that they can't jolly well browse for in a crowded Internet cafe.
Do I want to take extra risks for _those_? Even if I were sympathetic to the plight of poor souls forced to surf for kiddie porn with a laptop over someone else's connection, which I'm actually _not_... Fuck that. I'm not going to risk _my_ arse just to provide them with yet another unsecured access point.
Ah, screw Alice. (When she grows up a bit, anyway;) Think of the packaging for those interactive porn games.
;)
In fact, if you can make a bit of paper play sounds, heck, who needs the game there? The magazine could be its own game. Rub the girl in the photo there and hear her moan, rub her there and she... umm... sorry, gotta go to the bathroom. I'll... uh... do some brainstorming and get back to you later
ROFL. Well spotted. Damn well spotted. You have my heartfelt congratulations. Doubly so for making it that far into that message. Gave me quite a chuckle. I could have sworn there was an "up" in there somewhere, but apparently not.
Well, yes and no.
I'm not a fan of show-business as security, and I do believe that the USA could clean up its act... a lot. So far from me to speak against that idea.
That said, believing that just because you're nice, everyone will treat you nicely... is a bit naive.
- Some people will hate you just because they're crazy and suffering from various delusions, and in their deranged mind you're the Antichrist. Sad to say, paranoid schiophrenia is very real.
- Some people are simply sociopaths and simply don't give a damn about how nice a person you are. They could hurt you worse than you can imagine on a full stomach, and still be perfectly able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning. Now probably most of those wouldn't kill themselves on a plane, but (A) some might manipulate others to, and (B) you never know, some did kill themselves just to take a bunch of innocents with them, as their grand finale and exit.
- Some are having a breakdown and just want to end it all, often in a way that gets themselves remembered. Often that means shooting a bunch of shoppers or co-workers, or blowing up a school.
- Some will hate you for having a different religion, or different political affiliation, or whatever.
Etc.
I humbly submit as anecdotal support:
1. Such things as the Bath School disaster. Exactly what wrong did those children, aged 7 to 12, do to that guy? What reason did he have to blow them up? Even in his madness of blaming the government for his money problems, the children didn't really star as having done him any wrong.
2. The Unabomber. It wasn't some foreigner blowing up Americans as some act of international revenge. He was born american, to parents born american. The whole bombing campaign had been to attract attention to his deranged theory that industrialization had been a disaster for the human race. And even there, the victims weren't, dunno, people which would have been the villains even by that theory, but simply innocents to attract public attention and get his manifesto published.
3. The fact that most violence is actually sectarian. Sure, it gets the world's attention when someone from abroad blows shit up in the USA, but actually most terrorism is aimed at sects of the same religion. And a lot more terrorism than is aimed at the "evil" westerners, is aimed at terrorizing their own countrimen and neighbours and scaring them off cooperating with said "evil" westerners or off adopting western customs and ideas.
So, to cut a long story short, I would say that _only_ being nice is actually a pretty piss-poor defense. Sure, be nice, it may make it a lot harder to motivate people to blow themselves on your plane, but do be prepared to deal with the ones which aren't deterred by your just being swell guys.
The fallacy you're doing there is shifting the scales in that comparison. One side is learning Jazz at all, the other is being a _star_ in programming.
You'll find that being a star in _any_ discipline, Jazz included, isn't just a matter of being given a crash course in music notation. There are many who can learn Jazz, but there are few which are stars at it.
And there are a ton of people who just aren't any good at Jazz, no matter how much you teach them. There are those who are born tone deaf, or lack the coordination, or those who just aren't interested in a musical career, or those who find that learning uber-boring, or a dozen other cases which you just can't turn into _stars_ in any kind of music.
I'll further go and say that in Jazz (or any other kind of music) it's a relatively low pay career and with very few oportunity to become a super-star. So I'd wager that any music school gets an already filtered set of candidates. It's already those who love that genre, are sure that that's what they want to do, etc. It's already the people passionate and motivated.
In programming, we get a ton of drooling burger-flippers who think they can just get a quick training in Java and earn the big bucks. Not because they like it, not because it fits their personality type, not because they showed any kind of aptitude or inclination, just because they think they can fake their way to the big bucks. And it shows.
If you want a more apt comparison, compare them to the gang wanting to be a rock star in high school and college. The prospect of glamour and big bucks is there, and every other high-school boy wants to be in a rock band. The problem is that most suck, and will _never_ be even an acceptable player with any instrument. And aren't particularly motivated to train hard either. How many actually become a _star_? I'll say that's lost in the decimals.
So basically to sum up the comparison to Jazz:
1. Yes, you can teach Jazz. You can teach CS too. That's why we have that kind of colleges, you know.
2. You can't just take any guy off the street and turn him into a _star_ musician. If you went and took random people laid off by McDonald and tried to turn them into musicians, very few would even make an acceptable musician, and _extremely_ few will ever be considerable a _star_. Same as programming.
But, of course, that won't stop idiot PHBs from trying.
Well, for a start, I probably should apologize if anyone understood the "burger flipper" quip as singling out McDonalds' employees. As it happens the particular burger flipper I was referring to in that paragraph (and yes, he did get a real programmer fired for writing correct code he couldn't understand) is an ex-marketer.
It's more generally the complaint about anyone turned programmer with no more than a minimal course in some language, just because programming pays better, not because they actually have any inclination or aptitude. It's more that they're (still) burger flippers in the language of their choice, than whether they literally flipped burgers before. They're trained at most as unskilled manual workers.
As for the rest of your comment... well, I'll try to say it more diplomatically and constructively, but it's basically a more verbose version of what the AC already replied. Sorry.
See, thing is, programming isn't unskilled manual labour at any level. Whether you're designing the grand architecture of a whole enterprise system, or just the innards of a helper function, it's design and engineering work. So saying that someone should just teach you the language, but not the engineering principles, is a recipe for disaster that's been repeated too many times.
It's like saying that you should just teach someone how to use a wrench and a hammer, and then ask them to build you a custom car from scratch. Regardless of how hard management wishes that it were just a matter of mechanical work with those tools, it isn't. That guy may be able to hammer sheet metal like the best of them, but if he doesn't understand combustion engines, he'll still produce crap. Both performance-wise and safety-wise.
And that's just the mistake repeated in programming again and again and again. There's a ton of _horrible_ code out there, and a lot of security holes repeated verbatim again and again. (E.g., not only I see the same cross-site-scripting and SQL injection vulnerabilities repeated ten thousand times verbatim, but occasionally I even run into idiots arguing that they're overrated and inevitable anyway.) Because yet another guy didn't even understand the principles behind it, and didn't even know such basic stuff as how to quote a string for use on a site or in the database.
Please don't take that (necessarily) as an insult, but as an explanation of _why_ you need that engineering stuff. Because you _are_ doing engineering work. I'm not saying "go back to McDonalds", I'm saying, "do learn more and you'll be better at your job." Your choice whether you want to follow that advice, though.
Yes, sadly I'm dead sure, because I've actually talked to him about it. Yes, there are valid reasons to use the wrapper objects, this wasn't it.
1. Java likes to pretend that it doesn't have pointers, although it's a necessary concept. So a lot of people end up doing those kinky mental convolutions to remember when pass by value isn't really by value, instead of just learning (or teaching) pointers.
2. I think people need to be exposed to _explicitly_ using pointers, before relaxing the requirements to the hidden pointers of Java. You can't really understand something that you only heard about once, then never used. If it's just mentioned once in a lecture, and that's that, you'll promptly forget it. To really hammer in the concept of what a pointer is, and how it really works, you have to really write those asterisks and ampersands a few times and understand why you've put them, what they do, and what happens there.
Just as an extra anecdote and illustration of what happens when such people finally get told about pointers (but still don't quite "get it"): one team's architect actually told everyone to use "Integer" instead of "int" in method definitions everywhere, because it's faster! See, it copies only a pointer instead of the whole int!
Yeah, that guy was quite a bit less than a Michelangelo.
Yes, abstraction is key to tackling complexity. But equally, having no clue what happens behind that pretty Java code is the key to writing bad code and spending time debugging what you shouldn't even worry about.
Guess what? Even in Java, pointers still come to bite you in the arse when you least expect them. I see people every day who have trouble understanding the difference between "==" and "equals()" in Java, because they never learned the pointers behind them. They're essentially one abstraction level too far from understanding what their own code is doing.
Or even in Java learning why you can't modify an "int" parameter, but you can modify the contents of an "int[]" parameter, guess what? Requires pointers. People end up doing all sorts of unnatural metal contortions to remember when passing by value isn't really passing by value, when "it's a pointer" would sum it up perfectly.
And it shows. I've had people come to me half a dozen times with basically the same idiotic "auugh! Java's Hashtable is broken! I added a new value, and when I look into its array with a debugger it replaced my old one!" When in fact, it was only added a node to the front of the linked list. But they don't know what a linked list is, nor what a hash table really is, nor how a Node can contain another Node, without a concept of pointers. Worse yet, not only I see them spending a week debugging Hashtable, I see piss-poor workarounds done to prevent it from doing its job.
Or I see burger-flippers-turned-programmers occasionally get the real programmers fired for doing the right thing. Like using a "==" where it's correct to use it. But the burger flipper doesn't understand that. He learned some "for String use equals()" mantra, and he'll apply it and preach it, cargo-cult style, without even understanding what he's _doing_.
Or I see people think that optimization means replacing two lines with a one line call, because they have no fucking clue what the machine does with that code. They think that speed is measured in lines of code, because noone explained to them otherwise. So they wonder why their replacing two ifs with a catch is actually slower. (And I'm not getting into the many ways such a catch can make the code less secure, for example, by assuming that a real exception is just their loop reaching the end of the array.) Exactly what throwing an exception does, is a mystery to them.
Etc.
No, noone said you must keep programming in "a language where even K&R wrote unsafe code, nor that difficulty equals worthiness. But it helps to be at least exposed to those concepts once, even if thereafter you go on to program in Java or VB for the rest of your days. The fact that you worked with pointers once in C and managed to get them right, _will_ show in your Java code too.
Probably the best thing that helped my coding was doing assembly on my parents' old home computer, back in high school. In fact, in hex, because that ZX-81 with 1k RAM didn't even have enough RAM for an assembler. Wrap your mind around _that_, if you think C is too hard.
Would I advise anyone to write a production program in assembly nowadays? Nope, God forbid. I wouldn't have advised writing a whole program in assembly even back then. But understanding the machine behind that high level stuff will show even in your Java code.
And, yes, not every architect needs to be a Michelangelo. But it helps if they're not a clueless moron who can't even build a doghouse right. You can see plenty of architects nowadays who can't even get a basic house right. They know how to draw an artsy sketch of a house, but they have no clue how to calculate it to actually stand upright or what materials to use so it doesn't get damaged by rain within a year or two. And/or need a civil engineer to fix their elementary mistakes. Maybe it wouldn't hurt that much if they knew a bit more, ya know?
I mean, by that line of reasoning, working around a virtual farm doesn't sound that exciting either, but Harvest Moon did just that. Let you run around the farm, shear the sheep and brush your horse. I'd guess it must have sold enough copies to make it worth porting to most consoles that ever existed.
An even more bizarre, and I would dare say _disturbing_, concept is Boong-Ga Boong-Ga. The Japanese arcade game where you get to shove a giant plastic finger in what looks like the plastic arse of someone bent over. And watch their face as they scream in pain. And then get your virility and sexual behaviour judged by how brutal an anal probing you gave the poor bugger(ed).
I'm not sure how that would translate even to the Wii, because thrusting the wiimote at thin air must be, at a wild guess, not quite the same as shoving it into someone.
The Japanese also seem to have these interesting game concepts, like driving a big truck... while staying under the legal limit, obeying all the traffic rules, and avoiding causing any damage to your truck or someone else's property. Break too many rules and you're fired. Does that sound exciting? Well, they too didn't think us gaijin would find it exciting, because in the USA version they turned it on its head. Cause enough mayhem and you get a bonus.
So, well, don't be too quick to dismiss the concept. I'm sure some people will find it hilarious to flip pancakes with the wiimote, and stir in a pot with it.
I don't understand them, but, hey, they probably wouldn't understand why I'm posting on Slashdot from home at 1 AM either.
Actually, if this wasn't already part of a PR coup, it will become one very soon. "Scientist proves that diamonds are the prettiest existing crystals" is a great way to remind people to buy diamonds, and give them a good excuse for conspicuous consumption too.
The part about another crystal which could theoretically be as pretty, only it doesn't exist (and, as another poster noted, can't possibly exist because electrons aren't shared that way, plus it would be opaque) is just that extra bit of "science" to make it easier to swallow. It lets people feel that they've connected the dots themselves to reach your conclusion.
I mean, "scientist proves that diamonds are the prettiest possible thing in the universe" is a superlative, plus you're feeding people your message a bit heavy handed. Some will resist it. "Scientist proves that only one thing could be prettier, except it doesn't exist in nature" lets people go, "haha, silly scientist, but in the meantime, out of the things one can actually buy, diamonds are the prettiest, right?" Only now it's their own conclusion, and they won't fight it. In fact, they'll feel all smug and smart about it.
Sad to say, that's how PR works.
PR isn't marketing. PR is marketing's evil stealthy brother. It loves to masquerade as news, science studies, etc. Marketing plants the seeds, but PR ploughs your mind first.
Marketing just goes and tells you "Buy Mars chocolate bars, they're great." PR comes and tells you, "Scientists prove that chocolate is good for you! Valuable enzymes found in cocoa beans!" (Except, what they don't tell you, those enzymes are no longer present in chocolate.) That was an actual PR stunt sponsored by Mars.
Marketing just tells you "The suit is back! Buy Men's Warehouse suits, they look all professional and stuff!" PR goes and tells you "The suit is back! Here's a ton of interviews with managers swearing that they'd never hire someone who doesn't wear a business suit 24/7." That was an actual PR stunt debunked that was linked to even on Slashdot.
So, anyway, they write some piece of news and then carpet bomb sites and newspapers with it. A lot of newspapers, especially local ones, are even happy to just print whatever PR sends them, because it's written well and it's more interesting than local "raccoon found in Mr Smith's car" stuff. So pretty much any PR agency can get you in those. A really good one can get you on TV and on Reuters. Those tend to be a lot more expensive.
And faked scientific studies aren't new stuff either. A _lot_ of PR stuff is published as stuff backed by science and (pseudo)maths. The way that goes is, some PR hack writes some pseudo-science babble. It doesn't have to make any sense. It can add different units, or claim that a theoretical crystal is pretty when the electron structure would make it a metal, and thus look like Tin. It doesn't matter. If you can spot that, you're not in their target demographic anyway. Then it starts fishing for people with a Dr or Prof title who'll sign it. A lot say "fuck off", but eventually one has nothing to lose, noone takes him seriously anyway, and he could use the money. He'll take the pie in the face for their money.
Now I'm not saying that this particular paper is necessarily PR. It could be, but it also could be just someone who wanted to see his name in a journal. But even if it wasn't written as PR for the diamond cartel, that cartel could very easily use it as PR if they need some. Far from sending someone to kill him, they're probably happy right now.
Well, more power to him if he can survive on that kind of ideals, but the fact is: the business world doesn't work like that. Corporations are pretty much _supposed_ to do that. If they can make more bucks for their shareholders, the same company is _supposed_ to simultaneously try to sell you some chips (undercutting some other potential supplier) and then go and try to undercut the computers you make with those chips.
If you look at some of the major players, they're doing it all the time.
E.g., IBM goes and partners with AMD and sells them some fab capacity, then goes and sells and promotes computers with Intel CPUs. Then it goes and tries to get people to buy its own Power blades and mainframes instead of stuff from either AMD or Intel. Basically it actively advertises, and sends salesmen to companies, to hammer in the message, "buy our own super-duper Power stuff, PCs aren't any good as servers."
E.g., Oracle goes and partners with IBM, and appears on stage at launches and proclaims its undying love for IBM platforms, then goes and advertises, "don't buy DB/2, buy an Oracle database. Look in how many ways DB/2 sucks compared to our database in the latest benchmarks. Oh, and while you're at it, buy our own application server instead of WebSphere. And BTW, our benchmark was on cheap commodity PCs too, not on those sucky expensive IBM things."
E.g., the same Oracle goes and plays Red Hat's best buddy and all committed to that platform, then comes and tries to steal Red Hat's Linux support business. You know, get Red Hat's work in putting together that distro for free, but don't repay them with a support contract. Come get your support from us instead.
Etc.
_That_ is how the business world works.
Again, I realize that if a physical person did the same, they'd lose all their friends and maybe end up in a mental hospital. But companies actually do that all the time, and their investors expect them to act like that.
If you have moral objections to that kind of behaviour, good, try to have the laws changed. But in the meantime it's naive of Negroponte to expect that if Intel does some business with him, then Intel is his faithful and loyal serf for eternity. _If_ he actually expects that.
So basically they're a normal corporation, acting perfectly normally to create more value for its shareholders, eh?
I mean, just like, say, Sun during Scott McNealy's CEO days, going "we love Linux and OSS" in the morning and "Linux is teh suck! Die! Die! Die!" in the evening of the same day? Or like IBM showing up at Athlon launches and proclaiming its undying love for AMD, then spending 100 million on developping an Intel-only chipset that nearly negated the advantage of AMD's IMC and hypertransport? Or like AOL using Netscape to negotiate a big subsidy from MS, essentially a huge corporate bribe to use IE instead of Netscape, then suing MS for anti-competitive behaviour against Netscape? Etc.
Sad to say, that's just normal behaviour for corporations. Someone showing up at your product launches is more of a way for _them_ to be in the public's eye, than really meaning that they won't backstab you the next day.
What's normal for normal people, isn't normal at all for corporations and viceversa. If someone acted like a corporation and showed up to proclaim his undying friendship in the morning, then tried to lead a mob with torches and pitchforks to your home in the evening, chances are we'd put them in a mental institution. But conversely, if a corporation tried to stay your best friend even if it loses them money, the shareholders would want heads to roll.
To be entirely fair, though, it's also a mistake to see a corporation as one monolythic entity with only one brain. Just because department X thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread, doesn't mean that department Y won't try to backstab you. Sometimes even just because the manager of department X really just wants to undermine the manager of department Y.
In some cases they even backstab each other. See, for example, the sad story of OS/2. One department developed it as an alternative to paying the Windows tax to MS. Another department refused to ship IBM computers with OS/2 installed, because they could get a bigger discount on Windows if they're MS-only on the computers they sell.
Don't try to understand internal corporate politics, that-a-way lies madness of Lovecraft proportions.
Actually, you're onto something there, but IMHO that quote really just illustrates the fact that men are more likely to relate to another man's view of women. It's because both have the same stereotypes and wishful-thinking ideas, while reality often tends to not quite fit that.
So, yes, if Jack Nicholson describes women as the men's stereotype of women, including the illogical and unaccountable part, other men will find it a perfect portrayal of women.
It's not even something new. In medieval Japan the justification of why only men are allowed to play women roles in Kabuki theatre was... that supposedly women are too close to feminity to play it accurately. At first read it sounds like a major WTF. If they're closer to feminity, wouldn't that make them _more_ believable in a woman's role? Well not unless you also consider the audience: for men. A real woman wouldn't fit the male audience's stereotypes and prejudices as well as a man playing those stereotypes. Those guys came to see their stereotypical medieval woman image, all airhead, submissive and utterly unable to even exist without a Real Man lording over her. They want to see someone embodying that stereotype to the letter, and sometimes melodramatically, not someone showing the quirks of a real woman.
Or you can see the same phenomenon on MUDs and, to some extent, MMOs. Men pretending to be women are quite often more believed in that role, than the real women. Believed by other men, that is. Because they fit the audience's distorted notions better than the real thing does.
Yes, there are also the ones dancing naked in the Stormwind fountain. But just because _some_ people are unable to play a stereotype well, it doesn't mean that it doesn't work for more talented authors and actors.
Just to be entirely fair, though, I suppose the opposite should also be true. A man portrayed by a woman should probably also be more believable to other women, than the real thing.
I've actually had the mis-fortune of seeing a few romance movies, and the guys were portrayed as far from the real thing as you can get without adding tentacles and bug eyes. Whether it was Mr Perfect wooing the heroine or the henchman or whatever, those just fell somewhere in _my_ uncanny valley. They acted disturbingly not quite like real men. The actors may have been biologically male, but the role wasn't. But apparently the core demographic for that kind of thing doesn't have their suspension of disbelief tripped.
Heh... so basically you're saying that it started as a pervert's and misogynist's substitute for porn. Even the sophistry about a female's role and strength being reduced to obedience and modesty isn't entirely a new philosophical concept, it's pretty much standard misogynistic stuff.
Well, gee, I guess you illustrate perfectly why women didn't really take her as a role model.
Sadly it's still not that simple.
If Sony thought that everyone who can't find a PS2, will go buy a PS3, yeah, they would have killed it already. Unfortunately, even from a position of monopoly (which Sony doesn't have), that's still not an easy stunt to pull. See MS's trouble convincing people to get Vista instead of XP.
In practice, if they couldn't buy a PS2 any more, a lot of people would do one of the following:
- go buy an XBox or Wii instead. (So Sony would be sacrificing their profits for the sake of raising MS's or Nintendo's.)
- if it was bought as a Christmas gift for some friend or relative, they'd go buy some other toy instead. (Same as above.)
- get told to use an emulator to play the PS2 games they want to play. (And emulators are one thing that make Sony nervous, for a variety of reasons. Not all of them retarded.)
Etc.
Ditto for developers. A lot of people already bought the tools and got the know-how for PS2 games. If they'd rather make another PS2 game and you don't want to publish it, it's not guaranteed that they'll move on to the PS3. Some might figure out that if they have to learn new stuff and buy new tools anyway, they might as well do it for the best-selling console, not for the PS3.
Plus there is some trickle effect in old games bought. Everyone who buys a PS2 might go and grab a copy of some Final Fantasy game or Gran Turismo or whatever. There are a _lot_ of PS2 games which Sony already paid for, and even if they get a 5$ profit off selling a half-price copy, it's still more than nothing.
This is the only one which actually has a point, so I thought I'd give it a nod before moving on to the real offenders. Though even here, good luck getting marketers to quit using meaningless buzzwords.
Actually, IMHO your summary here is slightly inexact. What he demands is that they stop hyping and advertising Halo 3, and start hyping again when they release Halo 4. He has nothing against the version number, and his expecting a Halo 4 kinda doesn't imply that he sees the fight as finished. He's just tired of hearing about Halo 3.
Well, sadly
A) that's just capitalism in action. If MS thinks they can still sell Halo 3, how's that different from still advertising last year's model of car, or last year's CD of some band?
B) that advertising pays for some other things he's getting cheaper or for free. E.g., since the site name seems to imply having something to do with MTV, I'd like to see how MTV would survive without massive advertising. All those music videos are, effectively, advertising for whichever band the recording companies manufactured this year.
WTF? It's not like it even costs much to release a ROM for an emulator. But more importantly, what's _his_ problem there? It's not like anyone forces him to play or buy those anyway. Plus, being that they're ancient games, he should be able to find tons of reviews and whatnot.
Plus, here's the fun part: not everyone has the same tastes. What's crap for him and he doesn't want re-released, could be someone else's nostalgia moment. Even something like "Donkey Kong Jr. Math," well, why not? Some mom or dad might think that that's useful for their 6 year old.
Now this is truly brain dead. Those delays don't happen as some premeditated marketing ploy, they happen because people are bad at guessing the future. The fact is, even if you could know exactly how much code you'll need to write (you don't), and exactly how long it would take to _write_ it, you can't guess what bugs you'll have to fix. Therefore, nor how much time you'll spend fixing those.
Then there are the inevitable design changes. Some things it's easier to just see how it looks in the game, before you decide how you'll do it. Some things sound good in theory, but you'll find out that they suck when you sic the playtesters on it. Etc.
Sure, there are ways to make things more maintainable and reduce the surprises, but even that isn't 100% bullet proof. And good luck with getting the game industry to follow best practices anyway. Especially when:
A) you have the publisher telling you that it _has_ to be ready within X months and Y dollars, you just don't have the time or budget for UML diagrams and funky frameworks, and
B) you have to push the edge in terms of graphics and whatnot (because screenshots sell), but still have a finite budget of CPU cycles and GPU gigatexels/second, and you know everyone will moan if the frame rate is even 1 less FPS than in another similar game. So, you know, you end up doing evil hacks just to meet those constraints.
Seriously, short of hideously overestimating (which the publisher will reject from the start) or being able to see in the future, it just won't happen.
Well, that much is clear. And I'm certainly not proposing to stop people from getting what they want.
The question was, sorta, when did people start wanting to be stupid, and why? When did it become fashionable to have the intellectual and cultural horizon of a midget in a well?
I'm not even as much asking about the news, as such. That is IMHO effect, rather than cause. As you were saying, people get the news they want to get. And I could even live happily with them getting some brainless entertainment -- news or otherwise -- for a couple of hours a day, if they still used their brains the rest of the time.
But that's just my problem: when they turn off that TV or log off from those gossip sites, they go on to try to be even _more_ stupid IRL. For some people, when they take a break from their circle of RL friends and turn on the TV, their IQ actually goes up one notch. On those TV news they might even accidentally learn that there's a war in Iraq, or that some weird place called Africa even exists, or some trivia. But then they go to their RL circle of friends and it's time for another round of, "oh, I'm too stupid for computers... and I'm too stupid for geography too, and I'm too stupid to have an opinion about Iraq, and generally, little old me has trouble even figuring out which shoe goes on the left foot in less than 2-3 tries. Each day."
Even that gossip and trivia they heard about on TV, are promptly discarded unless they're in the commonly-agreed fashionably brainless set, so as not to make their friends feel inadequate.