A bridge is also a fixed, well-known thing. It's not going to change radically in design between when you start and when you finish building it.
Software on the other hand is written for customers who themselves don't know what they want, in a market that is probably rapidly changing. It WILL change between the start and the end of the project in a lot of cases. Sometimes it changes because the customer changes their mind. Sometimes it changes because the market changes. Sometimes laws change. Sometimes the customers were just flat out wrong in everything they told you and the entire design is wrong as a reuslt.
When you're dealing with that, process does just get in the way.
If you want to see what happens when you keep layering more process on to try and fix perceived problems, just take a look at how any bureaucracy makes decisions. Government is well known for doing things that don't make any sense in the real world, and the reason why is that our (I work for a government) decision making isn't based on reality. Or even decision making, for that matter. It's all based on following a process and doing whatever comes out at the end. With enough process and a process-focused group of managers, the results don't even matter. Literally, this is the way people think: "Whatever happens has to be right because we followed the process, and if it goes wrong it's not our fault because we followed the process!"
There's always going to be some level of organization and control that is needed when several people are working on a common project, but you have to balance that with the need for people to actually think. When you pile up process on process on process you remove that and instead get a bunch of people who can't see what's actually going on because they're too busy complying with 14 different processes.
This particularly applies to software development. It's really important for a team to pick out what they specifically need for their project and what works for the team. Throwing in something like (for example) Test Driven Development just because it's currently a buzzword-compliant process won't get you anything except a lot of wasted time. Sadly, bad managers love to do exactly that because adding more process is itself a good CYA (Cover Your Ass) process.
The card issuers motivation to prevent fraud is that users seeing fradulent transactions tend to be really unhappy, and credit cards are a competitive and highly profitable business. They WANT you to be happy using your card so you keep on using it.
This is actually the exact reason why I buy so few online games for the Xbox. I'd buy a lot more, but I don't want to leave Live subscribed when I'm not using it (because it costs money) and I don't want to activate it now because doing so means eventually I have to call their horrible customer service to cancel it.
Why is there no cancel button in the UI like there is in any sane product?
The second part (keeping people off your home network) CAN be done by some consumer grade routers that support a Guest Network. My Netgear 37AV has that ability. You set up a second SSID that is open. It can get to the WAN port, but can't see anything on the LAN or the private SSID.
As for using bandwidth... no I'm not sure you can do a lot there with a standard router. You could turn on QoS to make sure that your traffic has priority on the router over someone elses, but you'll be pretty limited in terms of stopping them from chewing up bandwidth the rest of the time. I really don't recommend this if you're on a metered connection.
No, it sucks. It only works if you hold it still. One of the advantages of a portable device is being able to use it while moving, which you can't do with the 3DS.
Potential customers understand it just fine. It's NIntendo that doesn't get it. The DS was so successful because it was affordable and had great battery life.
The 3DS is neither of those things. It's too expensive and the battery life sucks, all in the name of a gimmicky technology that most users wind up turning off anyway. I mean you can't even use the 3d on a bus, which is about the only place I ever use my DS.
Isn't that like saying that Windows should have fewer security holes then Linux because they charge for the product and are therefore able to put more money into it? It's nonsense.
No, he's currently busy filing a patent on Slashdot's new SpeedDupe(TM) technology. Then he'll sue Twitter for millions, because their users have memories just as short as his.
I'm not sure there's really a security issue here. From the spec, all its doing is letting the server send back multiple items in response to a request for one item. So if you request X, and the server knows you're going to need Y too, it can send both at once.
It's not like the server can connect to you out of nowhere and start firing stuff at you. And since a server can already send malicious content back in response to a request, the security aspect isn't really worse then it already is.
Agreed totally. Factor in the cost of commuting, and the TIME for commuting. I can get a lot done with all that time back, and I don't actually live that far from my office.
People in the greater Toronto area who have 90 minute commutes each way every day I can totally see this. That's 3 hours of gas, wear and tear on the car, and stress every single day. You could make that back with a pay cut easily, and you can't put a price on not having to drive through that traffic!
I had been recommending Samsung laptops to people who asked me for advice after having a lot of good experiences with them... then they go and pull this BS?
Great way to alienate people, Samsung. No way I can give out recommendations now.
I'm playing a Holy Priest, and I've got one of those Logitech mice with 8 buttons. I use every single one, some of them with keyboard modifiers to get more out of them.
Raid healing with a lot of spells is faster the more you can click cast, and more buttons lets you use more spells that way. Course, Priests also have a lot more spells then Paladins with stuff like Leap of Faith.:)
I have that comic taped to my door. Any programmer who walks by, reads it, and doesn't laugh is someone I watch VERY carefully when they write any code that touches a database.
"But choosing.NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I canâ(TM)t help but ask âoewhy?â"
I dunno... some of us don't go into job interviews and try to dictate what language and platform the entire organization will be using going forward. We call that the "real world". In the "real world", an individual programmer won't be deciding what to work in. It'll be determined by standards, contracts, policies, and in general a bunch of stuff that can be summed up easily: management.
A good programmer is going to be able to deal with that and in some cases will "choose" to work in.net becuase that "choice" is REALLY the choice between having a job or not having a job.
The rest of his post was either flamebait, stereotypical nonsense, or in the case of DirectX just flat out wrong (as commenters on his site were so nice to point out). Other then demonstrating that he likes to blather on his company website about stuff he doesn't seem to know very much about, I'm not sure what he was trying to accomplish.
Cost killed the idea of using USB for low speed peripherals and Firewire for higher speed ones. It's too expensive on a cheap PC to include both ports, so they only included the cheaper one (USB). Because USB was on everything, more devices wound up having USB support.
Once you have basically everyone with USB 2 and only a subset of those with Firewire, implementing the more expensive Firewire stops making sense on retail systems.
I can't help but wonder if the same thing will happen with Thunderbolt.
No they're not. The subscriber base is transient, and in the case of T-Mobile a sizable chunk of it is there because it's not AT&T. Those people won't stay once its absorbed by the evil empire.
Fewer carriers means you can get a similar situation to Canada. We have "few carriers", and pay some of the highest prices on the planet for pathetically weak service.
And none of those look as good as something like Crysis 2 that's got some decent PC optimizations.
The power comparison isn't even close, and that's if you just look at CPU/GPU speed & features and ignore stuff like RAM. The consoles are so memory starved that it's had a major impact on game design.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that and the whole corridor simulator problem. FF XIII doesn't feel like an RPG world. It feels like a giant hallway.
A bridge is also a fixed, well-known thing. It's not going to change radically in design between when you start and when you finish building it.
Software on the other hand is written for customers who themselves don't know what they want, in a market that is probably rapidly changing. It WILL change between the start and the end of the project in a lot of cases. Sometimes it changes because the customer changes their mind. Sometimes it changes because the market changes. Sometimes laws change. Sometimes the customers were just flat out wrong in everything they told you and the entire design is wrong as a reuslt.
When you're dealing with that, process does just get in the way.
If you want to see what happens when you keep layering more process on to try and fix perceived problems, just take a look at how any bureaucracy makes decisions. Government is well known for doing things that don't make any sense in the real world, and the reason why is that our (I work for a government) decision making isn't based on reality. Or even decision making, for that matter. It's all based on following a process and doing whatever comes out at the end. With enough process and a process-focused group of managers, the results don't even matter. Literally, this is the way people think: "Whatever happens has to be right because we followed the process, and if it goes wrong it's not our fault because we followed the process!"
There's always going to be some level of organization and control that is needed when several people are working on a common project, but you have to balance that with the need for people to actually think. When you pile up process on process on process you remove that and instead get a bunch of people who can't see what's actually going on because they're too busy complying with 14 different processes.
This particularly applies to software development. It's really important for a team to pick out what they specifically need for their project and what works for the team. Throwing in something like (for example) Test Driven Development just because it's currently a buzzword-compliant process won't get you anything except a lot of wasted time. Sadly, bad managers love to do exactly that because adding more process is itself a good CYA (Cover Your Ass) process.
The card issuers motivation to prevent fraud is that users seeing fradulent transactions tend to be really unhappy, and credit cards are a competitive and highly profitable business. They WANT you to be happy using your card so you keep on using it.
In Texas it's also illegal for an atheist to hold public office, so Texas isn't exactly a very good example.
It seems highly unlikely that people with the skill and sophistication to pull an attack this big off were nice guys until Sony was mean to GeoHot.
More likely it's just a coincidence in terms of timing.
This is actually the exact reason why I buy so few online games for the Xbox. I'd buy a lot more, but I don't want to leave Live subscribed when I'm not using it (because it costs money) and I don't want to activate it now because doing so means eventually I have to call their horrible customer service to cancel it.
Why is there no cancel button in the UI like there is in any sane product?
I'm sure all five Vanguard players are furious too. Boycott!!!
The second part (keeping people off your home network) CAN be done by some consumer grade routers that support a Guest Network. My Netgear 37AV has that ability. You set up a second SSID that is open. It can get to the WAN port, but can't see anything on the LAN or the private SSID.
As for using bandwidth... no I'm not sure you can do a lot there with a standard router. You could turn on QoS to make sure that your traffic has priority on the router over someone elses, but you'll be pretty limited in terms of stopping them from chewing up bandwidth the rest of the time. I really don't recommend this if you're on a metered connection.
No, it sucks. It only works if you hold it still. One of the advantages of a portable device is being able to use it while moving, which you can't do with the 3DS.
Potential customers understand it just fine. It's NIntendo that doesn't get it. The DS was so successful because it was affordable and had great battery life.
The 3DS is neither of those things. It's too expensive and the battery life sucks, all in the name of a gimmicky technology that most users wind up turning off anyway. I mean you can't even use the 3d on a bus, which is about the only place I ever use my DS.
This thing deserves to fail.
Isn't that like saying that Windows should have fewer security holes then Linux because they charge for the product and are therefore able to put more money into it? It's nonsense.
It's nonsense.
No, he's currently busy filing a patent on Slashdot's new SpeedDupe(TM) technology. Then he'll sue Twitter for millions, because their users have memories just as short as his.
I'm not sure there's really a security issue here. From the spec, all its doing is letting the server send back multiple items in response to a request for one item. So if you request X, and the server knows you're going to need Y too, it can send both at once.
It's not like the server can connect to you out of nowhere and start firing stuff at you. And since a server can already send malicious content back in response to a request, the security aspect isn't really worse then it already is.
Agreed totally. Factor in the cost of commuting, and the TIME for commuting. I can get a lot done with all that time back, and I don't actually live that far from my office.
People in the greater Toronto area who have 90 minute commutes each way every day I can totally see this. That's 3 hours of gas, wear and tear on the car, and stress every single day. You could make that back with a pay cut easily, and you can't put a price on not having to drive through that traffic!
I had been recommending Samsung laptops to people who asked me for advice after having a lot of good experiences with them... then they go and pull this BS?
Great way to alienate people, Samsung. No way I can give out recommendations now.
This is what happened when Gartner tried to predict the mobile market a few years out: http://www.asymco.com/2010/09/12/
They were so far off that it's hillarious today.
I'm playing a Holy Priest, and I've got one of those Logitech mice with 8 buttons. I use every single one, some of them with keyboard modifiers to get more out of them.
Raid healing with a lot of spells is faster the more you can click cast, and more buttons lets you use more spells that way. Course, Priests also have a lot more spells then Paladins with stuff like Leap of Faith. :)
I have that comic taped to my door. Any programmer who walks by, reads it, and doesn't laugh is someone I watch VERY carefully when they write any code that touches a database.
Hard to believe something this stupid got posted.
"But choosing .NET is a choice, and whenever anybody does it, I canâ(TM)t help but ask âoewhy?â"
I dunno... some of us don't go into job interviews and try to dictate what language and platform the entire organization will be using going forward. We call that the "real world". In the "real world", an individual programmer won't be deciding what to work in. It'll be determined by standards, contracts, policies, and in general a bunch of stuff that can be summed up easily: management.
A good programmer is going to be able to deal with that and in some cases will "choose" to work in .net becuase that "choice" is REALLY the choice between having a job or not having a job.
The rest of his post was either flamebait, stereotypical nonsense, or in the case of DirectX just flat out wrong (as commenters on his site were so nice to point out). Other then demonstrating that he likes to blather on his company website about stuff he doesn't seem to know very much about, I'm not sure what he was trying to accomplish.
Cost killed the idea of using USB for low speed peripherals and Firewire for higher speed ones. It's too expensive on a cheap PC to include both ports, so they only included the cheaper one (USB). Because USB was on everything, more devices wound up having USB support.
Once you have basically everyone with USB 2 and only a subset of those with Firewire, implementing the more expensive Firewire stops making sense on retail systems.
I can't help but wonder if the same thing will happen with Thunderbolt.
No they're not. The subscriber base is transient, and in the case of T-Mobile a sizable chunk of it is there because it's not AT&T. Those people won't stay once its absorbed by the evil empire.
The spectrum T-Mobile owns is valuable though.
Fewer carriers means you can get a similar situation to Canada. We have "few carriers", and pay some of the highest prices on the planet for pathetically weak service.
If you want more of that, by all means.
And none of those look as good as something like Crysis 2 that's got some decent PC optimizations.
The power comparison isn't even close, and that's if you just look at CPU/GPU speed & features and ignore stuff like RAM. The consoles are so memory starved that it's had a major impact on game design.
Because there's no particular reason for them to lower the fee?
VISA's not in the business of saying "well gee we have too much money today, lets cut the fees!"