We're talking about bureaucrats here. They never think about details like that.
I've dealt with similar nonsense when buliding systems before. Seven pages of codes to classify a file, most of which never get used because it was far too complicated for the users to figure out... and they don't think it's specific enough.
And I say that as a government employee. This type of nonsense goes on all the time.
Probably should have taken that $42 billion from Microsoft when you had the chance. But no, instead they let the MBAs run the place into the ground and now it's not really worth much of anything.
Probably because most people have a story like mine: go to Gamestop to buy a new game, and instead get a lecture about why I should have pre-ordered a month ago. Walk across the street to big box store that doesn't specialize in games. Buy game. Never go to Gamestop again.
I didn't even know I wanted the game before release, and I shouldn't have to put up with that nonsense from a game store when a random big box can stock new games without a fuss.
I can't think of any other retailer as terrible at selling their core product as Gamestop is that manages to stay in business. Nobody is on their side because they make buying games a miserable experience.
The trouble here is that some of these are bad examples. The Kin wasn't a bad idea, when it was first ready for release. It's the 18 month delay to retool it to run on Windows that actually killed the product. Released on time with what they had initially? Who knows.
The TouchPad was released at the same price as the iPad but isn't as good. Who thought that would work?
Pleanty of products still get time to mature. Android itself wasn't a massive success day 1, but has gained traction steadily and is huge now. There's a difference between something that is promising and just needs more development and a "me too!" inferior clone product that the market really doesn't care about.
Hell, some ideas don't get killed off fast enough. Fully electric cars have been worked on for how long now? They still suck.
And while we're on the subject, Hollywood is a bad example. Movies are one shot deals in terms of being profitable. A better analogy is TV, where a show that's a mediocre hit can get retooled to try and improve it but a lot of networks instead drop it after 6 episodes to throw something else at the wall.
Slashdot's been a constant read in my life for so long now that the idea you might leave never really crossed my mind. But I guess all things must change, eventually.
Well, thanks for all the years of reading and I hope you enjoy whatever you wind up doing next!:)
Legal or not, this is pretty clearly poor practice for the customer and rather shady. But it's nothing new. Gamestop is little more then a pawn shop these days anyway. Their PC selection has been so pathetic for years that I'm surprised they even sell this game.
I stopped going there years ago when I went to buy a game and was instead lectured about how I should pre-order. I then walked across the street to a big box store and bought it without the lecture. This is a terrible company and as soon as their pawn shop business is taken away by the console makers they will go under. Can't say I'll miss them in the slightest.
This might mean something except they said something entirely similar on From Dust. They lied. They're now trying to cover up that lie (unsuccessfully).
Chrome's addins don't break because they have much less access to the browser then FF extensions (which can use internal APIs and that's why they break more often). For example there's no true equivalent to FlashBlock on Chrome because the API makes it impossible. The closest thing just hides Flash, but it's still running.
I'm not sure what's missing. HP tried to get into the tablet business by buying Palm. The Touchpad bombed in spectacular fashion and will require them to take a huge loss.
Now they've decided they can't compete in that business. They probably should have figured that out earlier, but better late then never I suppose.
Oh that's from the distant past where they were worried that those poor voters in BC would just fall all over themselves to support whoever people in Ontario voted for if they only they knew who that was. It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions). Today it's archaic. Threatening jail time for talking about Election Results on Twitter (where there was an active group of people like me circumventing the law with the help of friendly foreigners) is so absurd that even trying to enforce it just brings the law into disrepute.
They try to justify it by saying that people in BC will still be influenced by knowing who Ontario voted for, while ignoring the fact that the gap in poll closing times is so short that very few people are even affected. That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
Yes, our election system here in Canada works pretty well. No, it's not perfect. In particular the ban on publishing results is a running joke that was easily circumvented by a ton of people on election night. It's so easy to get around it these days (particularly thanks to helpful foreigners willing to lend a hand by reposting results) that even trying to enforce it just wastes time and makes the government look stupid.
As for online voting... I'm against it. There's a number of reasons why, including that the paper ballots work really well (and are much harder to hack then a website). But I don't see a lot of harm in doing a test. That's the best way to get some real data on how it's going to work. Elections Canada is pretty good at this stuff, so I'm not surprised they want to try it out and gather some first hand data on how it works. There certainly are some cases where it would be helpful, such as far north rural areas where ridings are HUGE and it's a real burden to get to vote. We saw that turnout up north was the lowest in the country and 20% below PEI/New Brunswick (small areas with high turnout). That's worth trying to fix. It's also an option for special ballots instead of mailing out paper forms.
Isn't no Farmville spam the entire selling point of Google+? Everybody I know using it is there precisely because it's NOT Facebook and doesn't have all the annoying spam (and even more annoying emo users) that make Facebook a wasteland of human stupidity.
They could ditch levels if they used the talent system instead, because levels are just an artificial thing that gets in the way. But for new players (and players like my wife who play very casually) having stuff to gain is a good thing by questing. Also if you threw every skill at her at once at level 1, she'd just get really confused.
This game isn't only played by super hardcore types that read the forums for cookie cutter builds and know everything on day 1.
Something that's not been mentioned is that the writing has taken a sharp decline. I mean we're talking about a Blizzard MMO, the story was never spectacular. But in Vanilla and BC (and some of Wrath) it was good enough to do the job. It made sense. It drove things forward. It gave you reasons for why stuff was going on.
Cataclysm is just pathetically bad in this regard. Things routinely happen that aren't explained in the game (go buy a godawful Richard Knaak book!). When things are explained, they're hackneyed and don't make sense. It looks like it's just been set up so the team has an easy excuse to create PvP. The Horde has gone back to being the rather flagrantly evil faction, though mostly because they have one flagrantly evil member (the Forsaken and their plague warfare) and the rest of them say "hey don't do that!" then remain blissfully ignorant that it's going on anyway.
Also, content is a problem. Being 85 basically obsoletes everything except 85 content. Except that after release they went a very long time without any. When 4.1 hit and we got new dungeons, it was recycled troll dungeons from previous versions of the game retuned for 85, and that's it. So. Very. Weak. The raids in 4.0 were too hard for many people who had been able to raid in Wrath (they're easier now, but those people got bored and left with nothing to do). Now something apparently good came out in 4.2 but the damage is already done.
Combined with the general fact that the game is now getting old and every few months there needs to be a fan revolt to keep Blizzard from making some braindead decision they'd never have done in the past (real ID forum names, more recently trying to charge an extra fee to group with your real ID friends) and it's clear things just aren't what they used to be.
Finally, the competition is catching up. Blizzard had the advantage for years of other games not learning anything from WoW and having lousy UIs and unpolished releases. Not anymore.
It had to happen eventually, and here we are. The question now is just how many people it'll lose, and if they can get those people back with their next MMO.
This type of "analysis" is what you expect from Gardiner. It's nonsense. You're bang on. The fact of the matter is that there's consumer demand for Android, and there isn't for Windows Phone.
The handset makers will go where the sales are and expecting them to pay Microsoft for a platform that people don't want over a free one that people do want is lunacy. It's not happening. This only changes if Microsoft can drum up some demand for WP7 hardware. Maybe Nokia can do that.
Except that you don't win a competition by being a bad copy of your competitor.
People who want something like Chrome will use Chrome. Making FF into a bad clone of Chrome doesn't encourage people to use FF, it just drives away the users who didn't want a bad Chrome clone.
The vast majority never see it because it's over in Help > About.
For the people who DO need it at some point, it's pretty convenient having it there. What exactly is improved by not having it in Help > About? Other then absolutely nothing?
The discussion thread link is pretty illuminating reading. It shows just how disconnected from what people actually want FF to work on these guys have become.
Why does the UI team want to remove something from Help > About that exists in basically every program there is (and is a standard on basically every major OS)? Because they think they're cool. That's why. Don't like it? You're not cool.
They need to fire Asa and the entire UI team over there. That's the only way they'll stop the bleeding of users that is going on now. These guys are completely out to lunch and are just wasting effort chasing their own tail instead of doing things that users are actually asking for.
Oh well. At one point this was a great project, now it's just a dysfunctional one. That's what happens when you get management heavy and management gets spooked about market share. They try to take shortcuts instead of simply improving the product.
Well we figured that out when Asa said "we don't care about corporate users."
At this point I'm not sure they care about anybody except what sounds neat in their echo chamber morning meetings. They sure don't care what their users want.
It's because Asa brought in some really good weed.
That's the only explanation I have. They've totally lost their minds in the last six months over there. The UI is hideous now and keeps changing for no apparent reason other then to justify having a bunch of "UI guys" around. Then they did this rapid release nonsense, and to try and fix all the problems that's caused they're now hiding version numbers.
I assume next they'll tell me it's going to give me 50 free pigs in Farmville or something. Certainly they're not focused on stuff that actually matters.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about bureaucrats here. They never think about details like that.
I've dealt with similar nonsense when buliding systems before. Seven pages of codes to classify a file, most of which never get used because it was far too complicated for the users to figure out... and they don't think it's specific enough.
And I say that as a government employee. This type of nonsense goes on all the time.
Probably should have taken that $42 billion from Microsoft when you had the chance. But no, instead they let the MBAs run the place into the ground and now it's not really worth much of anything.
Maybe there's people who already have Visual Studio for other work purposes and also do python stuff?
It seems unlikely they'd make it if there was nobody using python on Windows.
Probably because most people have a story like mine: go to Gamestop to buy a new game, and instead get a lecture about why I should have pre-ordered a month ago. Walk across the street to big box store that doesn't specialize in games. Buy game. Never go to Gamestop again.
I didn't even know I wanted the game before release, and I shouldn't have to put up with that nonsense from a game store when a random big box can stock new games without a fuss.
I can't think of any other retailer as terrible at selling their core product as Gamestop is that manages to stay in business. Nobody is on their side because they make buying games a miserable experience.
The trouble here is that some of these are bad examples. The Kin wasn't a bad idea, when it was first ready for release. It's the 18 month delay to retool it to run on Windows that actually killed the product. Released on time with what they had initially? Who knows.
The TouchPad was released at the same price as the iPad but isn't as good. Who thought that would work?
Pleanty of products still get time to mature. Android itself wasn't a massive success day 1, but has gained traction steadily and is huge now. There's a difference between something that is promising and just needs more development and a "me too!" inferior clone product that the market really doesn't care about.
Hell, some ideas don't get killed off fast enough. Fully electric cars have been worked on for how long now? They still suck.
And while we're on the subject, Hollywood is a bad example. Movies are one shot deals in terms of being profitable. A better analogy is TV, where a show that's a mediocre hit can get retooled to try and improve it but a lot of networks instead drop it after 6 episodes to throw something else at the wall.
Slashdot's been a constant read in my life for so long now that the idea you might leave never really crossed my mind. But I guess all things must change, eventually.
Well, thanks for all the years of reading and I hope you enjoy whatever you wind up doing next! :)
Legal or not, this is pretty clearly poor practice for the customer and rather shady. But it's nothing new. Gamestop is little more then a pawn shop these days anyway. Their PC selection has been so pathetic for years that I'm surprised they even sell this game.
I stopped going there years ago when I went to buy a game and was instead lectured about how I should pre-order. I then walked across the street to a big box store and bought it without the lecture. This is a terrible company and as soon as their pawn shop business is taken away by the console makers they will go under. Can't say I'll miss them in the slightest.
This might mean something except they said something entirely similar on From Dust. They lied. They're now trying to cover up that lie (unsuccessfully).
Sorry Ubi, you shouldn't use the same lie twice.
Chrome's addins don't break because they have much less access to the browser then FF extensions (which can use internal APIs and that's why they break more often). For example there's no true equivalent to FlashBlock on Chrome because the API makes it impossible. The closest thing just hides Flash, but it's still running.
I'm not sure what's missing. HP tried to get into the tablet business by buying Palm. The Touchpad bombed in spectacular fashion and will require them to take a huge loss.
Now they've decided they can't compete in that business. They probably should have figured that out earlier, but better late then never I suppose.
At $100 I'd get one even if I can't put Android on it. It'd be a very cheap tablet browser.
Oh that's from the distant past where they were worried that those poor voters in BC would just fall all over themselves to support whoever people in Ontario voted for if they only they knew who that was. It's a law from before daily tracking polls or the Internet (or even timeshifted TV channels from other regions). Today it's archaic. Threatening jail time for talking about Election Results on Twitter (where there was an active group of people like me circumventing the law with the help of friendly foreigners) is so absurd that even trying to enforce it just brings the law into disrepute.
They try to justify it by saying that people in BC will still be influenced by knowing who Ontario voted for, while ignoring the fact that the gap in poll closing times is so short that very few people are even affected. That number is greater in the Atlantic provinces, but those are so small that nobody really cares who they voted for anyway.
Yes, our election system here in Canada works pretty well. No, it's not perfect. In particular the ban on publishing results is a running joke that was easily circumvented by a ton of people on election night. It's so easy to get around it these days (particularly thanks to helpful foreigners willing to lend a hand by reposting results) that even trying to enforce it just wastes time and makes the government look stupid.
As for online voting... I'm against it. There's a number of reasons why, including that the paper ballots work really well (and are much harder to hack then a website). But I don't see a lot of harm in doing a test. That's the best way to get some real data on how it's going to work. Elections Canada is pretty good at this stuff, so I'm not surprised they want to try it out and gather some first hand data on how it works. There certainly are some cases where it would be helpful, such as far north rural areas where ridings are HUGE and it's a real burden to get to vote. We saw that turnout up north was the lowest in the country and 20% below PEI/New Brunswick (small areas with high turnout). That's worth trying to fix. It's also an option for special ballots instead of mailing out paper forms.
Isn't no Farmville spam the entire selling point of Google+? Everybody I know using it is there precisely because it's NOT Facebook and doesn't have all the annoying spam (and even more annoying emo users) that make Facebook a wasteland of human stupidity.
Someone did actually, and Facebook blocked it. Funny how they don't want such a thing to exist.
They could ditch levels if they used the talent system instead, because levels are just an artificial thing that gets in the way. But for new players (and players like my wife who play very casually) having stuff to gain is a good thing by questing. Also if you threw every skill at her at once at level 1, she'd just get really confused.
This game isn't only played by super hardcore types that read the forums for cookie cutter builds and know everything on day 1.
Something that's not been mentioned is that the writing has taken a sharp decline. I mean we're talking about a Blizzard MMO, the story was never spectacular. But in Vanilla and BC (and some of Wrath) it was good enough to do the job. It made sense. It drove things forward. It gave you reasons for why stuff was going on.
Cataclysm is just pathetically bad in this regard. Things routinely happen that aren't explained in the game (go buy a godawful Richard Knaak book!). When things are explained, they're hackneyed and don't make sense. It looks like it's just been set up so the team has an easy excuse to create PvP. The Horde has gone back to being the rather flagrantly evil faction, though mostly because they have one flagrantly evil member (the Forsaken and their plague warfare) and the rest of them say "hey don't do that!" then remain blissfully ignorant that it's going on anyway.
Also, content is a problem. Being 85 basically obsoletes everything except 85 content. Except that after release they went a very long time without any. When 4.1 hit and we got new dungeons, it was recycled troll dungeons from previous versions of the game retuned for 85, and that's it. So. Very. Weak. The raids in 4.0 were too hard for many people who had been able to raid in Wrath (they're easier now, but those people got bored and left with nothing to do). Now something apparently good came out in 4.2 but the damage is already done.
Combined with the general fact that the game is now getting old and every few months there needs to be a fan revolt to keep Blizzard from making some braindead decision they'd never have done in the past (real ID forum names, more recently trying to charge an extra fee to group with your real ID friends) and it's clear things just aren't what they used to be.
Finally, the competition is catching up. Blizzard had the advantage for years of other games not learning anything from WoW and having lousy UIs and unpolished releases. Not anymore.
It had to happen eventually, and here we are. The question now is just how many people it'll lose, and if they can get those people back with their next MMO.
This type of "analysis" is what you expect from Gardiner. It's nonsense. You're bang on. The fact of the matter is that there's consumer demand for Android, and there isn't for Windows Phone.
The handset makers will go where the sales are and expecting them to pay Microsoft for a platform that people don't want over a free one that people do want is lunacy. It's not happening. This only changes if Microsoft can drum up some demand for WP7 hardware. Maybe Nokia can do that.
Except that you don't win a competition by being a bad copy of your competitor.
People who want something like Chrome will use Chrome. Making FF into a bad clone of Chrome doesn't encourage people to use FF, it just drives away the users who didn't want a bad Chrome clone.
The vast majority never see it because it's over in Help > About.
For the people who DO need it at some point, it's pretty convenient having it there. What exactly is improved by not having it in Help > About? Other then absolutely nothing?
The discussion thread link is pretty illuminating reading. It shows just how disconnected from what people actually want FF to work on these guys have become.
Why does the UI team want to remove something from Help > About that exists in basically every program there is (and is a standard on basically every major OS)? Because they think they're cool. That's why. Don't like it? You're not cool.
They need to fire Asa and the entire UI team over there. That's the only way they'll stop the bleeding of users that is going on now. These guys are completely out to lunch and are just wasting effort chasing their own tail instead of doing things that users are actually asking for.
Oh well. At one point this was a great project, now it's just a dysfunctional one. That's what happens when you get management heavy and management gets spooked about market share. They try to take shortcuts instead of simply improving the product.
Asa's a jackass. For the good of the project, he needs to be fired with extreme prejudice.
Preferably out of a cannon.
How about the current UI minus the ugly as shit transparency stuff in Windows 7?
Though FF isn't quite as bad as Thunderbird, because that thing is just embarrassing now.
Well we figured that out when Asa said "we don't care about corporate users."
At this point I'm not sure they care about anybody except what sounds neat in their echo chamber morning meetings. They sure don't care what their users want.
It's because Asa brought in some really good weed.
That's the only explanation I have. They've totally lost their minds in the last six months over there. The UI is hideous now and keeps changing for no apparent reason other then to justify having a bunch of "UI guys" around. Then they did this rapid release nonsense, and to try and fix all the problems that's caused they're now hiding version numbers.
I assume next they'll tell me it's going to give me 50 free pigs in Farmville or something. Certainly they're not focused on stuff that actually matters.