Probably because it's gotten popular, and so now we have a bunch of bloggers writing about it that don't remember why people moved to it in the first place.
I work in a government office as a developer. We get lots of projects that come from management, who may or may not actually understand the business they're managing. If they do, they can give you some idea of what they want. If they don't... they can give you a very vague, buzzword-laden description of what they want.
What would tend to happen is people would go off and try to use something like waterfall. They'd go gather requirements, build a big specification, design, etc etc. The managers in question would sign off. We'd build it. We'd then learn at the end that it actually doesn't do what they need it to do, and their business actually doesn't work the way they said it did. Why? Because managers and users suck at dealing with this type of stuff (in my experience). In house, consultants, it doesn't matter. This has been done wrong so many times that we decided to try something more agile.
And it's worked for us. We build the pieces that people actually do know we need (either because they're based on a paper process that we can look at, or because some user can articulate it). We get that into people's hands. They tell us what they hate, what they still have to do manually, and what would make their lives easier. Then we go off and build those pieces.
It's not actually saving us time, but the users have been MUCH happier with the end products. And since I like happy users and dislike spending time building things that are pointless just because two years ago someone thought it should be in the requirements, this works out pretty well for me.
It's not the right way to do every project or in every environment, but my users certainly don't hate it. (Quite the opposite, we get a lot more feedback from people asking for improvements now because they've seen it acted on more readily.)
No it's not. It's about the license the script is given to you under.
It has nothing to do whatsoever with what the script actually *does*, or if it's harmful. Code doesn't magically become safer because the license changes.
I'm sacrificing my freedom by loading a webpage that is going to run some code which I can look at with any text editor and see exactly what it's doing (though I may need to de-minify it first)?
Honestly, if that is the biggest threat to my freedom these days, we're in much better shape than I thought!
TFA in this case is surprisingly difficult to understand. It reads like it's aimed at the converted, and the rest of us who are more concerned with "does the site work?" and "are there security concerns?" aren't invited. Either that or I'm really missing something, because I can't fathom why in a million years I would ever care in the slightest about this.
No, because the problem you're describing is no way related to what TFA is talking about.
You're talking about requiring a certain environment for the page to work.
They're talking about the javascript on the page being licensed to you in a certain way, which has no bearing whatsoever on if it actually works or not.
I've never heard anybody express the perception that Javascript is running on the server until now. People either know what it is (and thus where it runs) or they don't know what it is and thus don't know that it runs at all (and of those, 99% don't care so long as the site works).
Sure, some people like that. Most people don't. You're not going to get to 10 million players with a game where the entire playerbase is jackasses that try to chase newbies out of their little private playground.
Maybe if MIcrosoft wasn't doing such a shitty job of explaining the positive, the reaction wouldn't be so negative.
But they're not. They're saying "hey look, it's got cloud magic!" to an audience that has already dealt with the hype and subsequent failure of cloud magic for games.
It's their job to sell it to us, and they're failing miserably. The response is entirely predictable.
Why wouldn't they do that locally on one of the many CPUs that aren't required to show the game? Just what calculations are going to be so crazy intensive and yet have a dataset small enough where it's going to be faster to transmit it, calculate it there, send the results back, and load them?
There's almost no games that actually use four cores in a current PC, so what are they planning on doing that's going to require the equivalent of triple that while not generating (or requiring as input) a gigantic data set?
This won't work for any calculations in game that are latency sensitive. Someone push a button and the game needs to react? Cloud magic won't help, you need to deal with it locally.
It won't work for anything that's data-intensive, because they can't expect to send significant data back and forth reliably while people are already trying to play multiplayer on a lousy connection.
Since those are the two main things where a console with this level of local power might need help... what the hell are they supposed to be using all these servers for? Sounds like another Simcity debacle in the making.
They got people to start paying for Xbox Live back in what, 2005? 2006? Back then there wasn't a lot of competition and they had a strong offering.
On a new system, asking people to pay Microsoft a toll so they can then pay Netflix to use Netflix is almost as a big of a joke as asking people to pay to play multiplayer games. Sure some people will keep going along with it, but I expect it'll be a much tougher sell this time around given the competition has caught up (and in the case of indie games, blown way past).
What's the real price going to be? You know, the one after you factor in whatever they're charging for Xbox Live this time around, in order to do what every other system on the planet lets you do for free. If they expect me to pay them for multiplayer gaming this time around, they're living in a fantasy land.
This unveiling was so vague and missing information that it's truly impressive. It's like Microsoft knows their answers are going to piss people off, so they're just avoiding giving details at all.
TBH the entire presentation was highly unimpressive. The people listening were core gamers, and Microsoft totally ignored them in favor of "hey look at Kinect moving the TV window around and bringing up a browser!"
1. How much stuff is going to require paying for Xbox Live to work? I'm not keen on the current "pay Microsoft to gain the ability to pay Netflix to use Netflix" model that the 360 uses, and have very little interest in more of that. If the answer is that it's free once you buy the hardware, my interest goes up significantly.
2. How many of the media features will work in Canada? Typically the answer is "very few". Maybe Microsoft can do better.
It's only going to be left alone if it can make giant piles of money and Yahoo management doesn't think they can boost some other property by linking them together.
Given that Tumblr is currently not profitable and Yahoo management most definitely thinks they can use it to boost their other properties, a promise that it'll be left alone isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Google's been shoving creating a g+ account down people's throats in order to use other Google services, so it's not surprising there's more accounts. But are any of them active?
So does Microsoft. They gave us Windows 8. How's that working out for them? (Considering they're now backtracking and putting boot to desktop and the start menu back in because the market isn't a big fan of what their UI design experts put out.)
I'm not really sure how it's an "uninformed criticism", when I'm using it. It's entirely informed. They moved the new things that I haven't seen and want to see off the screen, and kept old stuff that I've already seen and don't want to see again at the top. That's useful to me... why?
But yes, I'm sure that since a Ph.D came up with it, surely it's awesome and we should all bow down to it's greatness. So what if I have to scroll through old stuff to find new stuff, or have the alternative view of a metric fuckton of empty whitespace with a tiny list of content in the middle. I'm sure I'm just not seeing why that's actually a good thing because I'm not smart enough.
Say absolutely nothing with any real meaning
on
How To Talk Like a CIO
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· Score: 4, Interesting
That about covers it. We get this nonsense in the government too. Senior management does their "lean six sigma strategic planning" for the year, and comes up with a giant poster on the wall of the department priority plan.
It's got lots of lovely sounding buzzphrases and fuzzy things, but absolutely nothing that anybody who does any of the real work can actually do. So it's totally useless. Business goes on as usual, and we kind of nod politely when they're in the room and wait for them to leave so we can get back to work.
If you want to get by as a "leader" these days, the goal seems to be to offer no actual leadership, no firm plans, and no position on anything.
I use g+ regularly (I know, insert joke about being the only person on the net to do that here). I've liked it, for the most part.
But yesterday? Man. That new interface went live and how I have three tiny columns of posts. Which itself might be okay, except they're in no discernible order whatsoever. New stuff I haven't seen yet is buried off the screen, but there's six things from two days ago still hanging around at the top. Sometimes new things appear in a visible spot, sometimes they don't. I don't know why I need three columns when each one is so small that it's barely telling me anything, and looks like it was designed for a mobile screen. (The iPad app has a similar layout but has much saner ordering and uses 1 or 2 columns depending on the size of the item. It works far better.)
There's an option to turn it back to a single column, but the column stays the same size and now 2/3 of the screen is totally empty while I have to click to expand everything to see more than 30 words and scroll down like crazy. At least in that mode it seems to be ordered correctly.
The main reaction in my g+ circles to the update was confusion. It wasn't even the usual "change is bad" reaction. People were just lost in how they were supposed to read this new layout and find the new stuff in a simple way.
It's funny because g+ started off with a simpler, easier to use page than Facebook had. That's gone and reversed itself now. I really don't get what Google's thinking. As of right now, I'd actually rank the usability of Facebook more highly.
Vista did suck when it came out for quite a lot of people, but the core problem wasn't Vista. The problem was that the driver model changed and there was a lot of immature drivers out there. But for your average home user, all they understand is that the computer has Vista and isn't working as well as their older XP one did.
Windows 7 didn't share that problem because by time it came out the drivers had matured.
Windows 8's problem is that it's two UIs that don't play nice together in the same place, and people who know how to use Windows 7 (or XP) don't want to learn the new one and figure out when they're going to switch back and forth. It's a blunder on Microsoft's part that the two don't play together more nicely.
That, and what moron thought moving the "shut down" button into such an obscure location was a good idea? Yes, people do in fact turn PCs off fairly regularly.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably because it's gotten popular, and so now we have a bunch of bloggers writing about it that don't remember why people moved to it in the first place.
I work in a government office as a developer. We get lots of projects that come from management, who may or may not actually understand the business they're managing. If they do, they can give you some idea of what they want. If they don't... they can give you a very vague, buzzword-laden description of what they want.
What would tend to happen is people would go off and try to use something like waterfall. They'd go gather requirements, build a big specification, design, etc etc. The managers in question would sign off. We'd build it. We'd then learn at the end that it actually doesn't do what they need it to do, and their business actually doesn't work the way they said it did. Why? Because managers and users suck at dealing with this type of stuff (in my experience). In house, consultants, it doesn't matter. This has been done wrong so many times that we decided to try something more agile.
And it's worked for us. We build the pieces that people actually do know we need (either because they're based on a paper process that we can look at, or because some user can articulate it). We get that into people's hands. They tell us what they hate, what they still have to do manually, and what would make their lives easier. Then we go off and build those pieces.
It's not actually saving us time, but the users have been MUCH happier with the end products. And since I like happy users and dislike spending time building things that are pointless just because two years ago someone thought it should be in the requirements, this works out pretty well for me.
It's not the right way to do every project or in every environment, but my users certainly don't hate it. (Quite the opposite, we get a lot more feedback from people asking for improvements now because they've seen it acted on more readily.)
No it's not. It's about the license the script is given to you under.
It has nothing to do whatsoever with what the script actually *does*, or if it's harmful. Code doesn't magically become safer because the license changes.
I'm sacrificing my freedom by loading a webpage that is going to run some code which I can look at with any text editor and see exactly what it's doing (though I may need to de-minify it first)?
Honestly, if that is the biggest threat to my freedom these days, we're in much better shape than I thought!
TFA in this case is surprisingly difficult to understand. It reads like it's aimed at the converted, and the rest of us who are more concerned with "does the site work?" and "are there security concerns?" aren't invited. Either that or I'm really missing something, because I can't fathom why in a million years I would ever care in the slightest about this.
No, because the problem you're describing is no way related to what TFA is talking about.
You're talking about requiring a certain environment for the page to work.
They're talking about the javascript on the page being licensed to you in a certain way, which has no bearing whatsoever on if it actually works or not.
I've never heard anybody express the perception that Javascript is running on the server until now. People either know what it is (and thus where it runs) or they don't know what it is and thus don't know that it runs at all (and of those, 99% don't care so long as the site works).
Sure, some people like that. Most people don't. You're not going to get to 10 million players with a game where the entire playerbase is jackasses that try to chase newbies out of their little private playground.
There was a big market for continued development on the 3.5 system, and Wizards decided not to provide it in favor of the much reviled 4.0.
Paizo got to walk right into an open market and take it over. Smart business, really.
Maybe if MIcrosoft wasn't doing such a shitty job of explaining the positive, the reaction wouldn't be so negative.
But they're not. They're saying "hey look, it's got cloud magic!" to an audience that has already dealt with the hype and subsequent failure of cloud magic for games.
It's their job to sell it to us, and they're failing miserably. The response is entirely predictable.
Why wouldn't they do that locally on one of the many CPUs that aren't required to show the game? Just what calculations are going to be so crazy intensive and yet have a dataset small enough where it's going to be faster to transmit it, calculate it there, send the results back, and load them?
There's almost no games that actually use four cores in a current PC, so what are they planning on doing that's going to require the equivalent of triple that while not generating (or requiring as input) a gigantic data set?
This won't work for any calculations in game that are latency sensitive. Someone push a button and the game needs to react? Cloud magic won't help, you need to deal with it locally.
It won't work for anything that's data-intensive, because they can't expect to send significant data back and forth reliably while people are already trying to play multiplayer on a lousy connection.
Since those are the two main things where a console with this level of local power might need help... what the hell are they supposed to be using all these servers for? Sounds like another Simcity debacle in the making.
They got people to start paying for Xbox Live back in what, 2005? 2006? Back then there wasn't a lot of competition and they had a strong offering.
On a new system, asking people to pay Microsoft a toll so they can then pay Netflix to use Netflix is almost as a big of a joke as asking people to pay to play multiplayer games. Sure some people will keep going along with it, but I expect it'll be a much tougher sell this time around given the competition has caught up (and in the case of indie games, blown way past).
What's the real price going to be? You know, the one after you factor in whatever they're charging for Xbox Live this time around, in order to do what every other system on the planet lets you do for free. If they expect me to pay them for multiplayer gaming this time around, they're living in a fantasy land.
This unveiling was so vague and missing information that it's truly impressive. It's like Microsoft knows their answers are going to piss people off, so they're just avoiding giving details at all.
TBH the entire presentation was highly unimpressive. The people listening were core gamers, and Microsoft totally ignored them in favor of "hey look at Kinect moving the TV window around and bringing up a browser!"
1. How much stuff is going to require paying for Xbox Live to work? I'm not keen on the current "pay Microsoft to gain the ability to pay Netflix to use Netflix" model that the 360 uses, and have very little interest in more of that. If the answer is that it's free once you buy the hardware, my interest goes up significantly.
2. How many of the media features will work in Canada? Typically the answer is "very few". Maybe Microsoft can do better.
It's only going to be left alone if it can make giant piles of money and Yahoo management doesn't think they can boost some other property by linking them together.
Given that Tumblr is currently not profitable and Yahoo management most definitely thinks they can use it to boost their other properties, a promise that it'll be left alone isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Oh? Never noticed. I wasn't the only one in my circles to comment on it when the new UI went live either.
Maybe the amount of stuff being shown at once was so much smaller before that it just wasn't as big a deal.
How many of them are actually *using* it?
Google's been shoving creating a g+ account down people's throats in order to use other Google services, so it's not surprising there's more accounts. But are any of them active?
So does Microsoft. They gave us Windows 8. How's that working out for them? (Considering they're now backtracking and putting boot to desktop and the start menu back in because the market isn't a big fan of what their UI design experts put out.)
I'm not really sure how it's an "uninformed criticism", when I'm using it. It's entirely informed. They moved the new things that I haven't seen and want to see off the screen, and kept old stuff that I've already seen and don't want to see again at the top. That's useful to me... why?
But yes, I'm sure that since a Ph.D came up with it, surely it's awesome and we should all bow down to it's greatness. So what if I have to scroll through old stuff to find new stuff, or have the alternative view of a metric fuckton of empty whitespace with a tiny list of content in the middle. I'm sure I'm just not seeing why that's actually a good thing because I'm not smart enough.
That about covers it. We get this nonsense in the government too. Senior management does their "lean six sigma strategic planning" for the year, and comes up with a giant poster on the wall of the department priority plan.
It's got lots of lovely sounding buzzphrases and fuzzy things, but absolutely nothing that anybody who does any of the real work can actually do. So it's totally useless. Business goes on as usual, and we kind of nod politely when they're in the room and wait for them to leave so we can get back to work.
If you want to get by as a "leader" these days, the goal seems to be to offer no actual leadership, no firm plans, and no position on anything.
I use g+ regularly (I know, insert joke about being the only person on the net to do that here). I've liked it, for the most part.
But yesterday? Man. That new interface went live and how I have three tiny columns of posts. Which itself might be okay, except they're in no discernible order whatsoever. New stuff I haven't seen yet is buried off the screen, but there's six things from two days ago still hanging around at the top. Sometimes new things appear in a visible spot, sometimes they don't. I don't know why I need three columns when each one is so small that it's barely telling me anything, and looks like it was designed for a mobile screen. (The iPad app has a similar layout but has much saner ordering and uses 1 or 2 columns depending on the size of the item. It works far better.)
There's an option to turn it back to a single column, but the column stays the same size and now 2/3 of the screen is totally empty while I have to click to expand everything to see more than 30 words and scroll down like crazy. At least in that mode it seems to be ordered correctly.
The main reaction in my g+ circles to the update was confusion. It wasn't even the usual "change is bad" reaction. People were just lost in how they were supposed to read this new layout and find the new stuff in a simple way.
It's funny because g+ started off with a simpler, easier to use page than Facebook had. That's gone and reversed itself now. I really don't get what Google's thinking. As of right now, I'd actually rank the usability of Facebook more highly.
Can't find talented technical folks to join the team, or can't find talented technical folks to join the team for well below market wages?
Usually when people say one, they really mean the other.
Skyrim doesn't require Admin, and it happens to be the most recent of the games listed here.
In fact, I'm pretty sure this claim is total bullshit.
If you have web software that requires IE on Windows to work, the problem is on your end.
Vista did suck when it came out for quite a lot of people, but the core problem wasn't Vista. The problem was that the driver model changed and there was a lot of immature drivers out there. But for your average home user, all they understand is that the computer has Vista and isn't working as well as their older XP one did.
Windows 7 didn't share that problem because by time it came out the drivers had matured.
Windows 8's problem is that it's two UIs that don't play nice together in the same place, and people who know how to use Windows 7 (or XP) don't want to learn the new one and figure out when they're going to switch back and forth. It's a blunder on Microsoft's part that the two don't play together more nicely.
That, and what moron thought moving the "shut down" button into such an obscure location was a good idea? Yes, people do in fact turn PCs off fairly regularly.
Yep, nothing says "innovation" like confusing the hell out of your users and removing the ability to have multiple programs on screen at once.
Because nobody who uses Windows multitasks, right?