The value of a process isn't in managing the brilliant people. If they're brilliant, they probably don't really need the process. They'll have developed a system on their own that works. The value of a process is to provide a guidebook for the average or sub-average employee who either doesn't care enough to manage their production, or isn't cognizant of how to do it. A brilliant process will force relative incompetents to function on a level of basic competence where at least they aren't costing the company more than they produce. A broken process, however, will drag even the brilliant people down to inefficiency.
I was somewhere between phases 3 and 4 when I stopped playing WoW regularly. I still remember that my last raid was on October 14 of '06. I stopped playing when I realized that my guild had stalled and how sad it was that I wanted to find a guild that was "more hardcore" because we weren't progressing fast enough through Naxx, and yet I wasn't having any fun playing the game for the 30-40 hours a week I was online. A few months later, I uninstalled WoW altogether and I've not played it since.
I can't, and wouldn't presume to, speak for anyone else. I can speak for myself, though, when I say that I haven't regretted quitting WoW even once. I just wish I could convince my best friend to kick the habit, too. Ah, well. I'll still be waiting to be his friend again when he finally gets on with his life.
In those spider situations, I always figured the bugger'd been crawling on my face and spun back up above my head when it realized I was waking up and moving around. The light pitter-patter of spider shoes has woken me up from a deep sleep more than once in my life. I just count myself lucky that I woke up before it crawled into my mouth.
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I can only assume it's to comply with some niggling legal crap from the DMCA. Adding misfeatures like this costs them money, so they'd only do it if there's a valid risk/reward tradeoff. E.g., if they (a) fear major lawsuits or (b) expect the ability to play next-gen DVDs to play a major role in the marketplace viability of their products, it makes sense for them to do this.
This isn't really news. My company reported near record profits in the fourth quarter last year. How did that affect R&D (where I work)? It resulted in layoffs, cancelled projects, and further outsourcing of development efforts to India in early March.
I would propose that the primary source of this outsourcing is businesses who don't recognize software development as a core business, and so don't care so much about quality engineering practices or products that work. There are exceptions, of course, but I know that my company doesn't consider software to be essential to their profit model. As long as the software isn't losing money, they really don't care. They sure aren't willing to make the investment to really generate money with quality software.
I hope you're right. I'm getting really sick of the crappy-port mentality that Ubisoft and EA have been adopting for the last coupla' years. SC:DA "for the PC" is still a real sore spot for me. They didn't give the devs enough time on the port to even get the menus working properly? You've got to be kidding me...
Have you been reading reviews for "Splinter Cell: Double Agent" again? The metacritic rating for the PC version of that game is great. Pro reviewers hit it up for 8/10. User reviews are more in the 3-4/10 range. A game isn't very good when they can't even get the savegame menu to work properly 6 months later.
I'm typing on an e1705 right this very moment, bought around September of last year. I've been getting some shocks from the metal underneath the keyboard (got one just earlier today), but I blamed my sweater and the dry, winter climate.
If I can start blaming Dell, though, and maybe get some action on a lawsuit to boot, well, hell! American lottery, here I come!
M.U.L.E. was cursed with the dubious distinction of being ahead of its time. I still fondly remember playing it on our family's Atari 800 with my folks and my sister. I remember my dad "accidentally" picking that plot with 3 mountains instead of the river spot. I remember everyone screaming at the TV when a meteor was inbound, hoping it'd drop crystite on one of our plots of land. Heck, I even remember the family cat getting into the game, swatting at that darn spider as it ate all the food from a plot of land.
Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions/Death Knights/Dark Queen of Krynn. Ahhh, the good ol' days. I got more mileage out of those than I did from M.U.L.E., and I still think M.U.L.E. was one hot game too.
I never did finish the Forgotten Realms series. What was after CotAB? Secret of the Silver Blades or something like that?
I fear I'm something of a minority in my preference for patient, turn-based combat. I'd love to see those games remade with updated gfx and not a lot else. This real-time fetish that the industry picked up has never been my thing.
That's how Blizzard measures "skill" in all their games (WoW included. I played a priest.). The person who can click faster and more accurately is more skilled. Strategy doesn't really enter the picture--- if your clicks aren't pure spinal reflex, you're too slow.
I don't like throwing away CDs. Any CDs. They're small, easy to store, and goshdarnit I spent a lot of money on them! I keep the boxes too, for some bizarre reason. I still have a copy of Borland C++ Builder 3 floating around.
I mentioned this earlier. Certain software, such as WoW, Black and White, and Master of Orion 3, serves as a useful object lesson/reminder to me. From MoO3 and HoMM4 I learned, "Franchise names do not imply quality games. Wait for the reviews." From Black & White I learned, "Don't buy into the hype machine." From WoW I learned, "Don't pay someone for the privilege of letting them control your sense of accomplishment."
If I ever do experience a weak point and feel like picking one of those games up again (Which, by the way, has never yet happened), I'll notice the others on the spindle and that reflexive cringe will remind me of the reason I put games on that spindle in the first place. It's all a mind-game, sure, but that's what learning is.
I wouldn't be too concerned about that. That's the spindle that has Master of Orion 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 4, and the original (unpatched) Black & White. It's my object lesson spindle, and I use it to remind myself of some of the difficult lessons that I've learned over the years.
You have no idea how glad I am that I finally don't care about this story. I uninstalled the game last weekend, and I've moved the CDs to my "never gonna play that game again" spindle in the back of my closet.
That's one addiction that I'll never regret kicking.
It's a case by case basis. The fact that you would have to add in the cost of broadband for an MMO doesn't mean that I have to. I'm getting broadband whether I play WoW or not, so there's no add'l cost associated with it. The grandparent post holds true for a great many gamers. I consciously made the decision to play WoW because, after working it out, I figured I'd save an average of at least $400-$500 per year.
Based on what I read into the article, as well as posts given by others who apparently have done work on the topic, it's not very surprising that the computer graded similarly to the humans.
Why should we be surprised, after all, when the humans we're comparing the machines to have first been trained to grade like they themselves were machines?
I don't think that the real concern is at all whether or not the humans grade similarly to machines based on the same criteria. I think that the real concern is how those criteria are defined and applied to individual papers. Such definition is what makes the difference between a good and bad essay grader, in my experience- and that is something which can't be done by computer.
Of course, if the graders were to define their own criteria, that would preclude any sense of fairness in grading when it comes to large-scale (such as state-wide or nation-wide) essays. We're stuck in a catch-22, and the only way that I see to get out of it is to redefine what these large-scale essays are assessing.
Standardized writing exams do not (and I would argue can not) provide absolute feedback as to a particular writer's ability to write. All that they can consistently do on a fair basis is rate the writer's skill in the mechanical (IE, non-subjective) aspects of the English language. The very fact the other aspects of the essay are subjective implies that it's not possible to grade them fairly except in the most extremely bad or extremely good cases anyway.
A computer is superb at evaluating mechanical aspects of language. Better at it than people. If we train our people to look for specific sentence or essay structure, we've simply extended the definition of the mechanical aspects of the language to include such structures. We've stated, "Active voice is good, Passive voice is bad." Such generalizations are hogwash in interesting literature. There's even a time and place for comma-splices and sentence fragments in good writing.
The whole issue could be put to bed if we simply admit that these tests aren't measuring the quality of an essay, they're evaluating a complex set of mechanics which define some set of things to be good and some set of things to be bad.
- Airhed (Who's not a huge fan of state-wide writing proficiency tests. Smack down lawsuits on teachers who flunk inept students, instead.)
On the surface, this looks like it could be the poor man's way to replace VB. (Like your average poor man could afford Windows anyway.)
The one thing about Longhorn that intrigues me is the fact that MSFT is apparently trying to abandon a great many outmoded paradigms. XAML is just another example (though not entirely original, as suggested elsewhere). I have to admit a non-trivial amount of morbid curiousity as to seeing how the whole system will ultimately work.
Slashdot Mirror
The value of a process isn't in managing the brilliant people. If they're brilliant, they probably don't really need the process. They'll have developed a system on their own that works. The value of a process is to provide a guidebook for the average or sub-average employee who either doesn't care enough to manage their production, or isn't cognizant of how to do it. A brilliant process will force relative incompetents to function on a level of basic competence where at least they aren't costing the company more than they produce. A broken process, however, will drag even the brilliant people down to inefficiency.
I use http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ for that.
I was somewhere between phases 3 and 4 when I stopped playing WoW regularly. I still remember that my last raid was on October 14 of '06. I stopped playing when I realized that my guild had stalled and how sad it was that I wanted to find a guild that was "more hardcore" because we weren't progressing fast enough through Naxx, and yet I wasn't having any fun playing the game for the 30-40 hours a week I was online. A few months later, I uninstalled WoW altogether and I've not played it since.
I can't, and wouldn't presume to, speak for anyone else. I can speak for myself, though, when I say that I haven't regretted quitting WoW even once. I just wish I could convince my best friend to kick the habit, too. Ah, well. I'll still be waiting to be his friend again when he finally gets on with his life.
In those spider situations, I always figured the bugger'd been crawling on my face and spun back up above my head when it realized I was waking up and moving around. The light pitter-patter of spider shoes has woken me up from a deep sleep more than once in my life. I just count myself lucky that I woke up before it crawled into my mouth.
I can only assume it's to comply with some niggling legal crap from the DMCA. Adding misfeatures like this costs them money, so they'd only do it if there's a valid risk/reward tradeoff. E.g., if they (a) fear major lawsuits or (b) expect the ability to play next-gen DVDs to play a major role in the marketplace viability of their products, it makes sense for them to do this.
This isn't really news. My company reported near record profits in the fourth quarter last year. How did that affect R&D (where I work)? It resulted in layoffs, cancelled projects, and further outsourcing of development efforts to India in early March.
I would propose that the primary source of this outsourcing is businesses who don't recognize software development as a core business, and so don't care so much about quality engineering practices or products that work. There are exceptions, of course, but I know that my company doesn't consider software to be essential to their profit model. As long as the software isn't losing money, they really don't care. They sure aren't willing to make the investment to really generate money with quality software.
I read it. He's apparently invented a directed, connected graph. Someone give this man the Turing award he so richly deserves!
I hope you're right. I'm getting really sick of the crappy-port mentality that Ubisoft and EA have been adopting for the last coupla' years. SC:DA "for the PC" is still a real sore spot for me. They didn't give the devs enough time on the port to even get the menus working properly? You've got to be kidding me...
Have you been reading reviews for "Splinter Cell: Double Agent" again? The metacritic rating for the PC version of that game is great. Pro reviewers hit it up for 8/10. User reviews are more in the 3-4/10 range. A game isn't very good when they can't even get the savegame menu to work properly 6 months later.
I'm typing on an e1705 right this very moment, bought around September of last year. I've been getting some shocks from the metal underneath the keyboard (got one just earlier today), but I blamed my sweater and the dry, winter climate.
If I can start blaming Dell, though, and maybe get some action on a lawsuit to boot, well, hell! American lottery, here I come!
M.U.L.E. was cursed with the dubious distinction of being ahead of its time. I still fondly remember playing it on our family's Atari 800 with my folks and my sister. I remember my dad "accidentally" picking that plot with 3 mountains instead of the river spot. I remember everyone screaming at the TV when a meteor was inbound, hoping it'd drop crystite on one of our plots of land. Heck, I even remember the family cat getting into the game, swatting at that darn spider as it ate all the food from a plot of land.
Man, I miss that game.
Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Champions/Death Knights/Dark Queen of Krynn. Ahhh, the good ol' days. I got more mileage out of those than I did from M.U.L.E., and I still think M.U.L.E. was one hot game too.
I never did finish the Forgotten Realms series. What was after CotAB? Secret of the Silver Blades or something like that?
I fear I'm something of a minority in my preference for patient, turn-based combat. I'd love to see those games remade with updated gfx and not a lot else. This real-time fetish that the industry picked up has never been my thing.
That's how Blizzard measures "skill" in all their games (WoW included. I played a priest.). The person who can click faster and more accurately is more skilled. Strategy doesn't really enter the picture--- if your clicks aren't pure spinal reflex, you're too slow.
Two reasons:
If I ever do experience a weak point and feel like picking one of those games up again (Which, by the way, has never yet happened), I'll notice the others on the spindle and that reflexive cringe will remind me of the reason I put games on that spindle in the first place. It's all a mind-game, sure, but that's what learning is.
I wouldn't be too concerned about that. That's the spindle that has Master of Orion 3, Heroes of Might and Magic 4, and the original (unpatched) Black & White. It's my object lesson spindle, and I use it to remind myself of some of the difficult lessons that I've learned over the years.
I hope it's more innovative than yet another RTS. I'm getting awfully bored with micromanage/clickfest games from Blizzard.
You have no idea how glad I am that I finally don't care about this story. I uninstalled the game last weekend, and I've moved the CDs to my "never gonna play that game again" spindle in the back of my closet.
That's one addiction that I'll never regret kicking.
It's a case by case basis. The fact that you would have to add in the cost of broadband for an MMO doesn't mean that I have to. I'm getting broadband whether I play WoW or not, so there's no add'l cost associated with it. The grandparent post holds true for a great many gamers. I consciously made the decision to play WoW because, after working it out, I figured I'd save an average of at least $400-$500 per year.
Y'know, I was going to mention something about a Godwin-invoking post getting modded insightful.
Then I remembered that I was reading Slashdot and that such asinine things are pretty much par for the course. So I wrote this instead.
-AirhedBased on what I read into the article, as well as posts given by others who apparently have done work on the topic, it's not very surprising that the computer graded similarly to the humans.
Why should we be surprised, after all, when the humans we're comparing the machines to have first been trained to grade like they themselves were machines?
I don't think that the real concern is at all whether or not the humans grade similarly to machines based on the same criteria. I think that the real concern is how those criteria are defined and applied to individual papers. Such definition is what makes the difference between a good and bad essay grader, in my experience- and that is something which can't be done by computer.
Of course, if the graders were to define their own criteria, that would preclude any sense of fairness in grading when it comes to large-scale (such as state-wide or nation-wide) essays. We're stuck in a catch-22, and the only way that I see to get out of it is to redefine what these large-scale essays are assessing.
Standardized writing exams do not (and I would argue can not) provide absolute feedback as to a particular writer's ability to write. All that they can consistently do on a fair basis is rate the writer's skill in the mechanical (IE, non-subjective) aspects of the English language. The very fact the other aspects of the essay are subjective implies that it's not possible to grade them fairly except in the most extremely bad or extremely good cases anyway.
A computer is superb at evaluating mechanical aspects of language. Better at it than people. If we train our people to look for specific sentence or essay structure, we've simply extended the definition of the mechanical aspects of the language to include such structures. We've stated, "Active voice is good, Passive voice is bad." Such generalizations are hogwash in interesting literature. There's even a time and place for comma-splices and sentence fragments in good writing.
The whole issue could be put to bed if we simply admit that these tests aren't measuring the quality of an essay, they're evaluating a complex set of mechanics which define some set of things to be good and some set of things to be bad.
- Airhed (Who's not a huge fan of state-wide writing proficiency tests. Smack down lawsuits on teachers who flunk inept students, instead.)On the surface, this looks like it could be the poor man's way to replace VB. (Like your average poor man could afford Windows anyway.) The one thing about Longhorn that intrigues me is the fact that MSFT is apparently trying to abandon a great many outmoded paradigms. XAML is just another example (though not entirely original, as suggested elsewhere). I have to admit a non-trivial amount of morbid curiousity as to seeing how the whole system will ultimately work.