Because these sorts of layoffs are cutting out dead wood, and the economy is a great excuse. The whole point is that CEOs have already learnt that being honest about why someone's being fired is a good way to have people hold an unnecessary grudge. Obviously, you can't say that, because it comes back to them and they get to find out that the company felt they were astonishingly mediocre.
People tend not to deal with evidence of their own incompetence well.
Well, that doesn't actually change the point - there are knowledgeable people who get paid a lot that aren't going to summarise an aspect of their field, or a field they know a fair chunk about, for $2. Wikipedia's anti-expert bias doesn't really change that.
The little I know of economic theory suggests that replacing intrinsic rewards - like the warm fuzzy feeling you get from contributing - with a small cash reward means that people will value contributing to Wikipedia at the price of the small cash reward. This is invariably less than the dollar amount they'd attach to an act of charity that also spreads knowledge.
tl;dr: don't offer cash rewards for people doing things for fuzzy emotional reasons. It doesn't work.
Part of the problem with team-based puzzles is that they're very difficult to do in a persistent world. Once they're solved, they're solved. Do you put them back? The person who knows the solution is wandering around some place, and is free to post the solution on the Internet. If you don't, then players not at the cutting edge of the game essentially play clean-up -- assuming, of course, that one *has* a cutting edge. An ARG is essentially a kind of MMO - it has a persistent world that's shared amongst all players, after all, and they assume that players are working together, and so are free to make the puzzles as tough as they can, confident that players will eventually find a way through.
To WoW's credit, most of the bosses in the dungeons in the two expansions require players to work out and execute on a strategy to defeat them. Unfortunately, the strategy is generally worked out during the beta testing, well before most players reach it, and players generally don't have the luxury of figuring out the strategy on their own.
Someone will eventually crack the way to do a persistent world with puzzles and discovery while being able to renew solutions. I expect it'll be done by designing a class of puzzle that the game can assemble hundreds of unique variations on, but players can't solve by building their own solver.
Can you go and get some RAM, at least? My old computer is 5 years old, and I can still get RAM for it. It's ridiculously cheap right now, and as a bonus your game'll run loads better.
I'm confused: as far as I can see, about the only people who want this implemented are Stephen Conroy and Family First. The Liberals don't want it, the Greens don't want it, citizens don't want it, child protection groups don't want it, and ISPs are only doing it to prove to the government that they're lying about the speed impact.
And, of course, the ability to write a app for web deployment using C#.
Really, Slashdot, I'm disappointed. You go for the knee-jerk "fuck Microsoft" when really we're looking at Microsoft's attempt to cede the Windows monopoly and rebuild the Win32 API lock-in that delivered that monopoly across the Internet? That's a much scarier prospect, especially seeing as.Net is the only product of theirs they haven't run into the ground yet.
Of course, it's also much more unlikely, but Slashdot's record on predicting the future of technology is the stuff of legends. Only on Slashdot do you find people claiming for half a decade that Linux would finally make inroads on the desktop then turn around and claim the iPod'll never take off.
Ballmer pretty much confirmed (was there yesterday) that was the strategy later on in his answer - to beat the standards bodies to new features. The entire strategy they presented was building a new Microsoft-only Web stack built on.Net, and then trying to lock people in with IE8+.
Just like we have to do already, with the fucking stupid "this video is not available in your country because we're scared of the world outside the United States".
If it comes down to fighting government bureaucrats over stupid censorship decisions, or having Fox News able to broadcast all the thinly-veiled hate speech it wants and hide behind free speech when people call them on it, I'll take the bureaucrats, thanks.
"And to that I say, it's a little bit hard to go to management and ask for the resources and time to implement a second parallel version of a service that already works splendidly well."
This is Google we're talking about here. The most recent update to YouTube is a button that reads back your comment to you. The question is not "whether they can justify it to management", the question is "will anyone do it".
Yes, but that's balanced by the possibility of smart kids being born from dumb parents via genetic mutation. How else did the smart parents become smart?
So what about hate speech, then? Do you really think anyone's going to arrest Sean Hannity for spewing his bile all over the airwaves?
Saying "hurrah free speech for everyone" only invites the nutjobs to spread their poison, and no-one will do anything because it'd be restricting their speech. Sometimes the chilling effect is a good thing, and lord knows we could do with a lot more people thinking before they speak.
Or I could just turn them into MP3s. It's not like the Apple DRM is impregnable - and the iTunes Store is quite nice.
Honestly, I think you people should get angry about regional restrictions some time instead of harping on the DRM all the time, which is mildly inconvenient but inevitably broken. Regional lockout is what forces me to pirate most of the time - I literally cannot buy the music I want because of licensing contracts. They are irrelevant! Getting data into a foreign country is no longer difficult!
Gmail's popular because it's free. Try monetising it.
You can either charge less than a desktop solution, or more. If you charge less, you're eating your desktop division's lunch. If you charge more, you're providing less service for more money, because the company ultimately doesn't own its data.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, Australia started off as a prison. It's right in line with the values Australian society was built upon: wowserism.
To Americans: yes. This is a real name for a political philosophy.
Because these sorts of layoffs are cutting out dead wood, and the economy is a great excuse. The whole point is that CEOs have already learnt that being honest about why someone's being fired is a good way to have people hold an unnecessary grudge. Obviously, you can't say that, because it comes back to them and they get to find out that the company felt they were astonishingly mediocre.
People tend not to deal with evidence of their own incompetence well.
I find it's hard to believe it's truly open when Microsoft were sued for trying to implement it.
Following the rules is what makes them the good guys, though.
They should outsource it to the train companies, cut out the middle man.
Well, that doesn't actually change the point - there are knowledgeable people who get paid a lot that aren't going to summarise an aspect of their field, or a field they know a fair chunk about, for $2. Wikipedia's anti-expert bias doesn't really change that.
The little I know of economic theory suggests that replacing intrinsic rewards - like the warm fuzzy feeling you get from contributing - with a small cash reward means that people will value contributing to Wikipedia at the price of the small cash reward. This is invariably less than the dollar amount they'd attach to an act of charity that also spreads knowledge.
tl;dr: don't offer cash rewards for people doing things for fuzzy emotional reasons. It doesn't work.
Part of the problem with team-based puzzles is that they're very difficult to do in a persistent world. Once they're solved, they're solved. Do you put them back? The person who knows the solution is wandering around some place, and is free to post the solution on the Internet. If you don't, then players not at the cutting edge of the game essentially play clean-up -- assuming, of course, that one *has* a cutting edge. An ARG is essentially a kind of MMO - it has a persistent world that's shared amongst all players, after all, and they assume that players are working together, and so are free to make the puzzles as tough as they can, confident that players will eventually find a way through.
To WoW's credit, most of the bosses in the dungeons in the two expansions require players to work out and execute on a strategy to defeat them. Unfortunately, the strategy is generally worked out during the beta testing, well before most players reach it, and players generally don't have the luxury of figuring out the strategy on their own.
Someone will eventually crack the way to do a persistent world with puzzles and discovery while being able to renew solutions. I expect it'll be done by designing a class of puzzle that the game can assemble hundreds of unique variations on, but players can't solve by building their own solver.
Can you go and get some RAM, at least? My old computer is 5 years old, and I can still get RAM for it. It's ridiculously cheap right now, and as a bonus your game'll run loads better.
Changing your race and class is a fair bit different to selling XP (and let's be honest here, this is more or less what they're doing.)
They're so close to stumbling across a subscription service model it's not funny.
Of course, ideally they'd hash out a model that doesn't assume that distribution and copying are hard to do, but it'd be a good start!
I'm confused: as far as I can see, about the only people who want this implemented are Stephen Conroy and Family First. The Liberals don't want it, the Greens don't want it, citizens don't want it, child protection groups don't want it, and ISPs are only doing it to prove to the government that they're lying about the speed impact.
And, of course, the ability to write a app for web deployment using C#.
Really, Slashdot, I'm disappointed. You go for the knee-jerk "fuck Microsoft" when really we're looking at Microsoft's attempt to cede the Windows monopoly and rebuild the Win32 API lock-in that delivered that monopoly across the Internet? That's a much scarier prospect, especially seeing as .Net is the only product of theirs they haven't run into the ground yet.
Of course, it's also much more unlikely, but Slashdot's record on predicting the future of technology is the stuff of legends. Only on Slashdot do you find people claiming for half a decade that Linux would finally make inroads on the desktop then turn around and claim the iPod'll never take off.
Ballmer pretty much confirmed (was there yesterday) that was the strategy later on in his answer - to beat the standards bodies to new features. The entire strategy they presented was building a new Microsoft-only Web stack built on .Net, and then trying to lock people in with IE8+.
Just like we have to do already, with the fucking stupid "this video is not available in your country because we're scared of the world outside the United States".
If it comes down to fighting government bureaucrats over stupid censorship decisions, or having Fox News able to broadcast all the thinly-veiled hate speech it wants and hide behind free speech when people call them on it, I'll take the bureaucrats, thanks.
Nope. I've got Adblock Plus on both, of course, but disabling the add-on makes no difference.
You should use my copy of Firefox: for some reason on my laptop I don't see these changes, but on my desktop I do.
I like the changes. I want to get it consistent. I'm baffled as to why one computer gets the changes while the other with the same browser does not.
"And to that I say, it's a little bit hard to go to management and ask for the resources and time to implement a second parallel version of a service that already works splendidly well."
This is Google we're talking about here. The most recent update to YouTube is a button that reads back your comment to you. The question is not "whether they can justify it to management", the question is "will anyone do it".
Then again, that button is pretty awesome.
Yes, but that's balanced by the possibility of smart kids being born from dumb parents via genetic mutation. How else did the smart parents become smart?
Except that C# is a decent little language? It's good to see it open-source, that way it can have a life after Microsoft tires of it.
So what about hate speech, then? Do you really think anyone's going to arrest Sean Hannity for spewing his bile all over the airwaves?
Saying "hurrah free speech for everyone" only invites the nutjobs to spread their poison, and no-one will do anything because it'd be restricting their speech. Sometimes the chilling effect is a good thing, and lord knows we could do with a lot more people thinking before they speak.
The irony does not escape me.
Or I could just turn them into MP3s. It's not like the Apple DRM is impregnable - and the iTunes Store is quite nice.
Honestly, I think you people should get angry about regional restrictions some time instead of harping on the DRM all the time, which is mildly inconvenient but inevitably broken. Regional lockout is what forces me to pirate most of the time - I literally cannot buy the music I want because of licensing contracts. They are irrelevant! Getting data into a foreign country is no longer difficult!
Gmail's popular because it's free. Try monetising it.
You can either charge less than a desktop solution, or more. If you charge less, you're eating your desktop division's lunch. If you charge more, you're providing less service for more money, because the company ultimately doesn't own its data.
It's a lose-lose situation.
A lack of solid evidence, which you've just provided.