Ignoring the fact that Australian TV caters only for the lowest common denominator, and as such we have the best collection of the worst shit from around the world. TV piracy is a huge problem because the TV networks have been bending us over a barrel for years.
Until very, very, recently Australian TV networks would sometimes take years to get a new TV series to Australia. It had to be a proven success somewhere in the world before anybody would pick it up here. Nobody, ever risked a new TV show that hadn't been a proven success. In fact, the only thing that started shaping up TV was TV Piracy.
Even when a show does get to Australia, most networks constantly mess with it's time slot leaving the viewer with no idea when their show is actually going to be on the air. ST:TNG is a good reference started off at 7:30 Tuesdays, slowly crept up to 11:30 Tuesdays then over the course of the next 6 years went through every single night of the week.
Because of this, it didn't come to a great surprise when good shows don't rate well in Australia. Well, it didn't come as a great surprise to anybody who has half a brain (obviously nobody on tv networks has even half a brain).
Without whom this little girl would have died. Oh, congratulations to Jesus for getting around to saving the little girl's life.
I'd imagine that if more people had donated money to the church, Jesus would have been able to get to her sooner rather than later. Jesus loves us, but he needs money. So get off of your chair and donate some money now, so her little friend might be saved.
It's very easy to see how self interest and collaboration can be a mutual experience.
1) If you're acting like a cunt, then someone's going to stab you somewhere that you value. 2) A group of people who, banding together, use and share their specialist skills for the tribe will out-preform a pack of cunts working against each other. 3) A successful group will protect each other from forces that may make them less successful. i.e. a pack of cunts coming to steal food and water.
Let's assume that a game has at least 10 hours of entertainment on average. That means each hour of entertainment costs you about $10/hour.
Considering that many games have far more than 10 hours of entertainment - I've probably got about 500 hours logged on Dawn of War, City Life. Hell, I'd have thousands (if not tens of thousands) of hours in Quake and Tribes - that makes it a pretty cheap form of entertainment.
Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input?
There's three problems with this concept:
The first is that you're ignoring 20+ years of technically competent people telling non-technical people that they are morons for not being able to understand the systems, this has lead to a lot of people assuming that they are immediately wrong.
The second is that often end users have been making awesome suggestions for decades, but developers don't understand or don't care to understand what the users are saying.
The third problem is that computer systems are often so complex that users don't truly understand what they want, just what they don't want. It can be exceptionally hard to clearly and definitively make a technical suggestion when you don't understand the technical problem space that you're dealing with. They need people who can interpret what they want to developers. Every other industry has them, why not ours?
Companies are listening, and as taboo as it may seem, most of them want to make their users happy, so if you shout loud enough, you're bound to be heard.
Companies are starting to think that it might be a good idea that maybe they should listen to someone that they consider might be a user, or perhaps that that they are listening but, in while reality they are not. Most of them don't even understand the difference between Business Process Requirements and User Requirements.
If you need proof of this, then just look at how Linux has progressed in its development.
Bad example. Until very recently, most nix distributions couldn't give a flying hoot about the end users experience. Can't you remember the 'in crowd' jokes that went along the lines of "Linux is very user friendly, it's just picky on who it's friends are"? Really, caring about non-technical users is extremely new in *nix care factor, and it's only there because they need non-technical users to get general acceptance in the home market.
For software developers, perhaps you could develop an attractive solution, and for users, maybe you could put forth more of an effort to speak up and become involved with this tool that you use everyday so that you can make it better now and for the future.
There is only one way for that to work, software developers have to bother to listen to them in constructive ways and in general the way that software developers listen to customers at the moment is very, very poor.
I've been a Usability Specialist for a few years now and before that I spent a lot of time in Customer Support. Customers have been complaining for years, upon years, upon years. The real fault lies at the heart of the problem, the people who make software don't listen to their users - for whatever reasons.
The new layout, style and user experience shows that the crew at Fark really have no clue about why their users come to the site. The fact that his only rational is "you'll get over it" shows how little he cares about the people who visited fark.
Quite frankly, the entire site can burn in a fire of crap now. It's like a homosex party in there, and not the "there's a time and a place for everything and it's called University" pretty boy homosex party, I'm talking about giant fat, hairy, sweaty, grunting men screaming abuse at each other in Russian homosex party. You know, the kind that good wholesome gay people get turned off on.
Now Digg has gone to crap, great... now what I supposed to do all day at work?
I'm sure that's an easy enough position for you to stand behind, seeing you must be, and proud of being, a nerd. However, appearances are often thrust upon women during their childhood and simply expecting people to discount that is stupid. How many women want other women to go "oh, you work in it", or the expectation that the only way for a women to advance in IT because they have tits?
All industries need exposure from people with different backgrounds. Having one social generality of "big fat nerd with chip stains on the keyboard" gives you access to a limited cross section of skills. In fact, Computer Science - both in a vocational and a academic manner - have grown and matured because the "classic nerd" has become a minority within the field.
If we, as a group, don't mature Computer Science and offer different streams of study then we are essentially pumping a dead concept. With streams like Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, Technical Business Analysts and Multimedia Design, programming can take a definite second place behind the theory and vocational skills of other Computer Science fields.
There is an ever increasing business migration towards exchange + outlook. It's practically a standard in most large enterprise organisations.
There is no way on this planet that any of the last few fortune 50 places I've worked at would even consider using anything other than exchange + outlook. The rest of your suggestions are living in a fantasy land of "the geeks shall inherit the earth" (i.e. ignorance of the posters point) and have little to no relevancy when regard to business usage standards.
As far as I could work out - in my sixty seconds of searching google - half life sold ~8,000,000 copies. Not every single one (or even the majority) of those copies would have installed Counter Strike, and out of the remaining copies that did install it, a large percentage of people didn't enjoy it.
How about World of Warcraft? With 8,500,000 concurrent active accounts? Looking at the sheer number of people who've unsubscribe it would have to own any other multiplayer game anywhere.
"If a nation expect to be ignorant and free...it expect what never was and never will be."
Jefferson, Thomas 3rd President of the United States (1801-1809)
Overall, I can't think of a way for an organisation to create an application that was worse than Blackboard. I still regard my time having to interact with that piece of shit software as some of my worst times at University. All in all, using Blackboard only made me, and my colleagues, dumber.
If only one University decides that Blackboard isn't worth using, then Vista has now made it into my heart as a successful product.
In general, a good developer is someone who can continually produce high quality products as defined by the specifications and methodologies of the business environment.
Everywhere that I've ever worked, that means that a good developer - or a developer that is going to get paid more than other programmers - can work well in teams, understand the impact of their decisions in the larger business space and produce solutions that are as maintainable, efficient and stable as the deadlines allow.
The real trick to success is understanding that developers working in a business environment are, shockingly, working in a business environment and that you're not immune to the aspects that everybody else in business has to deal with - i.e. you have to make a positive impact, otherwise it's probably cheaper and easier to just get someone else.
Just because some people can't get something, doesn't make it right. I can't afford a Ferrari, but nobody would justify me stealing it
That's a really shitty argument. I can afford to purchase the content, it's just impossible for me to attain it. If show's were available to legitimately download for a realistic price at the time of broadcast, I'd be there with bells on.
Similarly, if a movie or show isn't available in my market, it doesn't justify piracy because the distributor for one reason or another didn't make it available. Either wait or it, or petition for it to be made or sale.
It's not my fault that broadcasters, publishers and producers are caught in the 1970's while the world is getting ready to move into 2010's
If content providers were willing to adapt to a changing market, I'd be more than willing to pay.
What about CF bulbs for your garage in the middle of the winter? They're probably OK in Arizona, but what about freezing or subzero temperatures, like where I live? They don't work under those conditions (I've tried it). More than half of Australia would find subzero temperatures a rarity.
If fucking Australia can't make a go of solar power, who the fuck can?
There are a bunch of problems with solar power:
Solar Power doesn't work at night
You can't store the majority of solar power
To generate the same power as a power station requires vast quantities of land. IIRC the size I last recall was something on the scale of "The same size that both a hydroelectric and coal electric plants -including the mine space - to generate the same amount of power during the day: For the record, that's a lot of space
this requires farms to be built a long way from anything and the further away a power source is from the city the more power it has to produce
Solar farms destroy the environment under them; while it looks like the middle of Australia harbors nothing worth saving, it isn't true - there is a complex and delicate environment out there and instering thousands of solar panels wouldn't support it
Wouldn't that be a much more practical plan than pissing around with lightbulbs? LED tech will eventually solve that problem for us anyway.
Building any kind of hybrid or green power supply takes years upon years until you even start seeing a benefit. Even in your crappy example, to make any kind of difference will take years; I mean, in reality Australia is cutting a thin line when it comes to power generation anyway, if we built new power plants, we'd keep the old ones running anyway.
it isn't just anti=intellectual culture.
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
I know quite a few graduates who didn't seek a career in academia because it isn't a sound and healthy career option. Personally, I can't think of a better career than being an academic, if they didn't have to pull long hours for poor wages (at least in Australia).
All of these things can be done by pilots cheaper & better.
And un-manned aircraft can do things that Human pilots simply can't do.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring.
It doesnt take a big plane to carry one pilot around looking for smoke.
Sure, but if the price was lower you could have thousands or tens of thousands of them flying over the country. These thousands of
unmanned aircraft could act as simple spotters that identify potential fires and then alert human operators so they can come out and have a look
Also, some UAVs can stay aloft for weeks at a time. Something humans can't do.
(2) Search and rescue.
A good pilot can fly in any kind of weather too, and has a MUCH better chance of successfully picking people off a bobbing raft than any program you could possibly come up with... Cameras & code can only do so much... besides once you had the survivors aboard youd be breaking the law by carrying paying passengers without a properly certified pilot.
One of the hardest things in finding people is the lack of eyes on the job. If the price was right and you could put thousands of remote eyes facilitating the search in places that humans can't get to. It shouldn't replace humans, it should faciliate them.
The most important asset a pilot has is his judgement. He has to be able to make a decision about whatever the situation is in an instant & has to make the right choice every time. Why are we trying to make computers do this? Because its cheaper? I doubt it, by the time you build the UAV and all the computer hardware necessary, trained the users, setup all the necessary infrastructure around it, you may as well have gotten an old cessna & stuck a pilot in it. You can get the plane for $20,000 or so & its not hard to find fresh pilots who will work for close to nothing just to build hours.
You'd be surprised at the actual cost of some of the new UAVs being developed.
Would you trust your PC to drive your car? Would you trust it to drive your kids to school?
Poor examples, because we are not asking UAVs to fly us or our kids around
Slashdot Mirror
But there are so many of them ...
Ignoring the fact that Australian TV caters only for the lowest common denominator, and as such we have the best collection of the worst shit from around the world. TV piracy is a huge problem because the TV networks have been bending us over a barrel for years.
Until very, very, recently Australian TV networks would sometimes take years to get a new TV series to Australia. It had to be a proven success somewhere in the world before anybody would pick it up here. Nobody, ever risked a new TV show that hadn't been a proven success. In fact, the only thing that started shaping up TV was TV Piracy.
Even when a show does get to Australia, most networks constantly mess with it's time slot leaving the viewer with no idea when their show is actually going to be on the air. ST:TNG is a good reference started off at 7:30 Tuesdays, slowly crept up to 11:30 Tuesdays then over the course of the next 6 years went through every single night of the week.
Because of this, it didn't come to a great surprise when good shows don't rate well in Australia. Well, it didn't come as a great surprise to anybody who has half a brain (obviously nobody on tv networks has even half a brain).
Without whom this little girl would have died. Oh, congratulations to Jesus for getting around to saving the little girl's life.
I'd imagine that if more people had donated money to the church, Jesus would have been able to get to her sooner rather than later. Jesus loves us, but he needs money. So get off of your chair and donate some money now, so her little friend might be saved.
It's very easy to see how self interest and collaboration can be a mutual experience.
1) If you're acting like a cunt, then someone's going to stab you somewhere that you value.
2) A group of people who, banding together, use and share their specialist skills for the tribe will out-preform a pack of cunts working against each other.
3) A successful group will protect each other from forces that may make them less successful. i.e. a pack of cunts coming to steal food and water.
It would be closer to conjecture.
Let's assume that a game has at least 10 hours of entertainment on average. That means each hour of entertainment costs you about $10/hour.
Considering that many games have far more than 10 hours of entertainment - I've probably got about 500 hours logged on Dawn of War, City Life. Hell, I'd have thousands (if not tens of thousands) of hours in Quake and Tribes - that makes it a pretty cheap form of entertainment.
It's the entire 'fuck non-technical users" attitude that spews forth from highly technical users that has hurt nix distributions hard.
you'll please nobody at all.
Have you ever thought that if you wanted something to be improved, then maybe you should just speak up and offer a solution instead of quietly or publicly venting without offering any input?
There's three problems with this concept:
The first is that you're ignoring 20+ years of technically competent people telling non-technical people that they are morons for not being able to understand the systems, this has lead to a lot of people assuming that they are immediately wrong.
The second is that often end users have been making awesome suggestions for decades, but developers don't understand or don't care to understand what the users are saying.
The third problem is that computer systems are often so complex that users don't truly understand what they want, just what they don't want. It can be exceptionally hard to clearly and definitively make a technical suggestion when you don't understand the technical problem space that you're dealing with. They need people who can interpret what they want to developers. Every other industry has them, why not ours?
Companies are listening, and as taboo as it may seem, most of them want to make their users happy, so if you shout loud enough, you're bound to be heard.
Companies are starting to think that it might be a good idea that maybe they should listen to someone that they consider might be a user, or perhaps that that they are listening but, in while reality they are not. Most of them don't even understand the difference between Business Process Requirements and User Requirements.
If you need proof of this, then just look at how Linux has progressed in its development.
Bad example. Until very recently, most nix distributions couldn't give a flying hoot about the end users experience. Can't you remember the 'in crowd' jokes that went along the lines of "Linux is very user friendly, it's just picky on who it's friends are"? Really, caring about non-technical users is extremely new in *nix care factor, and it's only there because they need non-technical users to get general acceptance in the home market.
For software developers, perhaps you could develop an attractive solution, and for users, maybe you could put forth more of an effort to speak up and become involved with this tool that you use everyday so that you can make it better now and for the future.
There is only one way for that to work, software developers have to bother to listen to them in constructive ways and in general the way that software developers listen to customers at the moment is very, very poor.
I've been a Usability Specialist for a few years now and before that I spent a lot of time in Customer Support. Customers have been complaining for years, upon years, upon years. The real fault lies at the heart of the problem, the people who make software don't listen to their users - for whatever reasons.
The new layout, style and user experience shows that the crew at Fark really have no clue about why their users come to the site. The fact that his only rational is "you'll get over it" shows how little he cares about the people who visited fark.
... now what I supposed to do all day at work?
Quite frankly, the entire site can burn in a fire of crap now. It's like a homosex party in there, and not the "there's a time and a place for everything and it's called University" pretty boy homosex party, I'm talking about giant fat, hairy, sweaty, grunting men screaming abuse at each other in Russian homosex party. You know, the kind that good wholesome gay people get turned off on.
Now Digg has gone to crap, great
This technology is nothing to write back about and it certainly isn't new or innovative work.
I'm sure that's an easy enough position for you to stand behind, seeing you must be, and proud of being, a nerd. However, appearances are often thrust upon women during their childhood and simply expecting people to discount that is stupid. How many women want other women to go "oh, you work in it", or the expectation that the only way for a women to advance in IT because they have tits?
All industries need exposure from people with different backgrounds. Having one social generality of "big fat nerd with chip stains on the keyboard" gives you access to a limited cross section of skills. In fact, Computer Science - both in a vocational and a academic manner - have grown and matured because the "classic nerd" has become a minority within the field.
If we, as a group, don't mature Computer Science and offer different streams of study then we are essentially pumping a dead concept. With streams like Interaction Design, Human Computer Interaction, Technical Business Analysts and Multimedia Design, programming can take a definite second place behind the theory and vocational skills of other Computer Science fields.
There is an ever increasing business migration towards exchange + outlook. It's practically a standard in most large enterprise organisations.
There is no way on this planet that any of the last few fortune 50 places I've worked at would even consider using anything other than exchange + outlook. The rest of your suggestions are living in a fantasy land of "the geeks shall inherit the earth" (i.e. ignorance of the posters point) and have little to no relevancy when regard to business usage standards.
As far as I could work out - in my sixty seconds of searching google - half life sold ~8,000,000 copies. Not every single one (or even the majority) of those copies would have installed Counter Strike, and out of the remaining copies that did install it, a large percentage of people didn't enjoy it.
How about World of Warcraft? With 8,500,000 concurrent active accounts? Looking at the sheer number of people who've unsubscribe it would have to own any other multiplayer game anywhere.
"If a nation expect to be ignorant and free...it expect what never was and never will be." Jefferson, Thomas 3rd President of the United States (1801-1809)
Overall, I can't think of a way for an organisation to create an application that was worse than Blackboard. I still regard my time having to interact with that piece of shit software as some of my worst times at University. All in all, using Blackboard only made me, and my colleagues, dumber.
If only one University decides that Blackboard isn't worth using, then Vista has now made it into my heart as a successful product.
AO killed my inner child.
Look it up, the results are astounding. At least compared to crying on slashdot that you have to do requirements.
In general, a good developer is someone who can continually produce high quality products as defined by the specifications and methodologies of the business environment.
Everywhere that I've ever worked, that means that a good developer - or a developer that is going to get paid more than other programmers - can work well in teams, understand the impact of their decisions in the larger business space and produce solutions that are as maintainable, efficient and stable as the deadlines allow.
The real trick to success is understanding that developers working in a business environment are, shockingly, working in a business environment and that you're not immune to the aspects that everybody else in business has to deal with - i.e. you have to make a positive impact, otherwise it's probably cheaper and easier to just get someone else.
Just because some people can't get something, doesn't make it right. I can't afford a Ferrari, but nobody would justify me stealing it
That's a really shitty argument. I can afford to purchase the content, it's just impossible for me to attain it. If show's were available to legitimately download for a realistic price at the time of broadcast, I'd be there with bells on.
Similarly, if a movie or show isn't available in my market, it doesn't justify piracy because the distributor for one reason or another didn't make it available. Either wait or it, or petition for it to be made or sale.
It's not my fault that broadcasters, publishers and producers are caught in the 1970's while the world is getting ready to move into 2010's
If content providers were willing to adapt to a changing market, I'd be more than willing to pay.
If fucking Australia can't make a go of solar power, who the fuck can?
There are a bunch of problems with solar power:
Wouldn't that be a much more practical plan than pissing around with lightbulbs? LED tech will eventually solve that problem for us anyway.
Building any kind of hybrid or green power supply takes years upon years until you even start seeing a benefit. Even in your crappy example, to make any kind of difference will take years; I mean, in reality Australia is cutting a thin line when it comes to power generation anyway, if we built new power plants, we'd keep the old ones running anyway.
Go to a better school?
I know quite a few graduates who didn't seek a career in academia because it isn't a sound and healthy career option. Personally, I can't think of a better career than being an academic, if they didn't have to pull long hours for poor wages (at least in Australia).
All of these things can be done by pilots cheaper & better.
And un-manned aircraft can do things that Human pilots simply can't do.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring. It doesnt take a big plane to carry one pilot around looking for smoke.
Sure, but if the price was lower you could have thousands or tens of thousands of them flying over the country. These thousands of unmanned aircraft could act as simple spotters that identify potential fires and then alert human operators so they can come out and have a look
Also, some UAVs can stay aloft for weeks at a time. Something humans can't do.
(2) Search and rescue. A good pilot can fly in any kind of weather too, and has a MUCH better chance of successfully picking people off a bobbing raft than any program you could possibly come up with... Cameras & code can only do so much... besides once you had the survivors aboard youd be breaking the law by carrying paying passengers without a properly certified pilot.
One of the hardest things in finding people is the lack of eyes on the job. If the price was right and you could put thousands of remote eyes facilitating the search in places that humans can't get to. It shouldn't replace humans, it should faciliate them.
The most important asset a pilot has is his judgement. He has to be able to make a decision about whatever the situation is in an instant & has to make the right choice every time. Why are we trying to make computers do this? Because its cheaper? I doubt it, by the time you build the UAV and all the computer hardware necessary, trained the users, setup all the necessary infrastructure around it, you may as well have gotten an old cessna & stuck a pilot in it. You can get the plane for $20,000 or so & its not hard to find fresh pilots who will work for close to nothing just to build hours.
You'd be surprised at the actual cost of some of the new UAVs being developed.
Would you trust your PC to drive your car? Would you trust it to drive your kids to school?
Poor examples, because we are not asking UAVs to fly us or our kids around