Big deal - it doesn't make the game any more realistic, it just makes the game harder. I've been playing CS for quite some time - none of these things are new to me. Sure, I am more careful, but waiting 5 minutes to respawn is hardly a counter-argument to what I said. There have been times where I have made myself a target on a team with players better skilled to handle the situation, as to distract fire onto me and let them complete objectives or kill the opponents themselves. More often than not, I end up waiting 3-5 minutes to spawn.
It's obvious that you did not read anything past my mouse pointer analogy. Just like any job, people have to be in the right mindset for them to be effective workers. In the military, a lack of this mindset could cost a person it's life, or the life of others.
Bring a stopwatch to a gun safety class - when dealing with the unloaded rifles, point one at a class mate or even your instructor. Start the clock. Time how long it takes them to kick your ass out the door.
It's these kinds of things that I'm talking about. Even though I was around all sorts of pistols, rifles, hunting, and gun classes as a kid, nothing is effective as knowing what that stupid machine is really capable of. As a result, I haven't owned a gun for years, not seeing a reason to. I'm not saying that other people don't, just not me.
Playing a game for a few hours a night doesn't teach you how to effectively handle anything but that game. Real Life is consisted of ever-changing rules and possibilities, and until I can find a game that has a perfect model of real life, with no constraints, scripting, and perfect A.I., nothing will come close to substituting it.
You disagree with him, so you insult him, make a point (filled with name calling), and then make a broad, generalized statement to finish out your point.
Anytime someone refers to france or french anything, we rearchitect the statement to use the word "freedom" instead.
That publicity stunt did more to discredit the current administration for me than the whole "ashcroft covering lady liberty with a curtain" did on a symbolic scale.
I don't know where you get your information. Ted Turner? Hardly a conservative. Yet, he owns several networks. This has nothing to do with politics. Although you conspiracy theorists would like us to believe that "big media" is controlled by the right in order to convince us there isn't a liberal bias in the media (which there is).
Not that I agree with this bullshit conspiracy crap any more than you do, but Ted Turner was recently bellyaching about how he had no power over his networks anymore and that the credibility of them has gone down the toilet due to corporate corruption.
Yes, and firebombing Tokyo and Dresden were therefore purely defensive actions?
I think they've done a damn good job of keeping war from these parties off our soil.
We didn't enter World War II because of Pearl Harbor, just as we didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11. Both events were catalysts that allowed those in power to do what they had wanted to do all along.
Sad as it may be, it's pure speculation on both counts as of now. We have a lot more evidence that the latter fits your description, however.
To throw out another argument, though, at what point does "our soil" have to do with it? If americans have billions of dollars invested in a foreign nation, I'd that that the safety of those dollars matters as much to them as, say, the independence of one of our random territories. The military exists to back up our nation's best interests with force. I claim that, as repulsive as it sounds to me, if that includes my.5 acre of land then it also includes some CEO's 5 billion dollars of investments.
Are you really trying to propose that you can put a price on human life?
Someone attacks the states - lives lost.
War is waged on a country that has some of our investments - lives lost.
Which is really the greater good? So that country just got a heck of a lot of money - and that's the last they'll get from us, unless an investor is a complete idiot. But at least some unrelated third-party marine doesn't get his life terminated because some dumbass poured a ton of money into a foreign market and got screwed.
And "our best interests", that's laughable at best. The very people who fight for us do not get to choose whether they fight after they have enlisted (and in some cases, not at all: see draft), however, they do have the choice to elect people who get to choose if they fight. Sounds like a raw deal to me.
Again, it is the Department of Defense. Not the Department of Defense of our best interests of those who are elected.
What's sad about all this crap is that not only is his political agenda not getting across because he's paying so much attention to it, his opponent's political agenda isn't getting across either.
As a result, if that's what they want me to pay attention to, I'm going to pay attention to the guy who's trying to get his viewpoints and solutions out there so at least if I don't agree with him 100%, I have a good idea of what he's going to do for the next 4 years.
I'll write in or vote for Nader, or no one at all - unless I start hearing things that give me the ability to consider the other candidates.
Do I care if that gives Bush another 4 years to fuck up this country? Nope. Kerry did it to himself and let down a whole political party (which consists of lot more voters than appointees), I'm not letting that guy get 4 years to do it. At least I know how Bush is going to let me down, and I make a slim chance for Nader to get elected less slim.
Of course, neither of the major parties are going to ever consider something like run off voting, which gives the voter more power at the poll booth.
I don't remember who for sure, but I'm pretty sure it was Al Gore who once said (a long, long time ago, and this is a paraphrase at best), "Democrats are elected by the poor, laws are created to help them get rich, and then they vote for Republicans."
While I have seen cases which confirm and deny this statement, it just goes to show that one cannot pigeon-hole anyone. It's very easy for someone to forget their roots, we see it all the time amongst celebrities.
... but does the fact that talking about a calculator and feeling the need to link to a definition of the concept of a factorial shed a not-so-positive light on the average intelligence of the person reading this article?
If they can take it without setting foot on our soil, more power to them. It's not our jurisdiction at that point, all we have to do is keep it from getting to them to stop the theft.
It's called the Department of Defense for a reason.
In WWII, we stayed out of the war (well, at least actively) until our own soil was threatened - for any of you that read history.
Korea, Viet Nam, Somalia, Iraq, and I'm sure a whole host of other conflicts that I have forgotten about have had nothing to do with the defense of our country. Often the defense of others are cited, sometimes the threat to our country has been fabricated, or at least, had at least a large enough reasonable doubt to cause the controversy they did.
Of course, jumping systems like that were introduced in old Half-Life mods like FLF.
The problem is, when you're bunny-hopping around like an idiot, the only penalty you get is that you're not bunny-hopping anymore. No lack of oxygen from exhausting yourself (and all the real penalties that come with that), and I imagine you can still run at full speed (or least if you can't, the time between not running at full speed and running at full speed is not long enough).
And of course, when you've been playing for 8 hours straight you don't feel any fatigue in-game.
and the best Counter-Strike players (well, at least the ones who are taking home the prizes) are in Sweden - says a lot about the gamers in the states.
Of course, if this had any bearing on a real combat situation it would be a concern.
The mental candy of video games can help to sweeten this awful task. If you look even casually at the top-selling shooters, they're nearly all war games that put the white American soldier-player in the heroic role of killing black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples to "stop terrorism," or "fight for freedom," or any of the other popular cant that our drooling politicians preach. These games are rehearsal chambers for more than killing technique: they incubate a poisonous right wing sensibility, the stuff of America Uber Alles that has plunged us into a senseless and unwinnable war in Iraq.
Wow, I play a ton of FPS games - I do recall killing a lot of germans in WWII games, but mostly aliens, monsters, and the occasional criminal.
The one game that I do play that fits your definition, Counter-Strike, came out 5 years before all this bullshit started hitting the fan.
Chances are you have good intentions (and I was with you in the first two sentences of your post), but the crux, the justification of your argument is not only incorrect and ignorant, I'm inclined to believe it's a lie.
So, while you lie in some places to preach your valid view, you send the signal to some that perhaps your view is a lie as well.
Don't sell yourself short. It's easy to make your argument without lying, so don't.
No disrespect to your service, but you're saying that -- in order to get people to join the military -- we should present it in the worst light possible?
YES!
If I were a recruiter, or someone telling recruiters how to recruit, I certainly wouldn't want some nitwit who thinks getting up after he gets shot is as easy as "moving his right index finger up and down". An exaggeration perhaps, but I guess I would want to be recruiting people that are very aware of the dangers of war - these people are more likely to be mentally prepared for situations that require it.
When we sit down to interview someone for our programming team, we give them a test in our primary language (filled with trick questions), then we go over that test with them. Being right all the time is not the goal, but how you accept the criticism you recieve is. Then questions are asked about your skills as a designer. While the person with "all the answers" is not only impossible to find (because 7 or more people are dredging the waters for the most obscure development knowledge they can think of), people with the ability to say, "I don't know, can you explain it?" are just as hard to find.
Some people walk out during the test, some people never call us back because they think they have to be a super-human to work here. We didn't want people like that anyways.
Everyone in our group has a willingness to learn and work with the team, and a set of knowledge that contributes to the team (whether or not they picked it up on the job is unimportant). They are proactive learners and require little to no hand-holding. They aren't afraid to read code and ask questions.
As far as our team is concerned, that's what makes a good developer. Judging that site traffic has at least doubled every year and our systems scale to do it, and that we've gone from a 5-man team to an 8-man team in nearly 4 years time, I think we're doing a pretty good job.
If I was in an infantry division, I'd be damn scared to be next to the guy who "joined because he'd get a free ride to college and played a video game that gave him a 'good idea' of what the army would be like". That guy is nothing more than a meat puppet with a rifle, is and more likely to get me killed than a dedicated soldier who knows what he's getting into.
Maybe wasting money on video game development and ads that will never convince me to join the service could be better used to provide ammo to you guys.
You and I know these games aren't the first choices, but I dunno, it seems with all this stuff it's so easy to take that money and invest it in gel rounds (or whatever you guys use for "play ammo" these days), or even if it has to get that cheap, airsoft rifles, for crying out loud.
That's what really scares me about the military - all these ads, games, and propoganda glorify war in a way that makes it seem all so surreal... And of course, Dishonorable Discharge is one of the worst things anyone can have on their record, Court Marshal for be a deserter has even worse implications... Yet I have no guarantee that I will truly be "ready for combat" at the point that I am thrusted into it.
And since my chances of dying are significantly higher in the military than, say, staying home and playing Counter-Strike and working a civilian job to pay for my internet connection... Have fun!
The next time you joined any server, a calculation would be made to see if you got any medical attention, in time, at all, would be required for permission to join
Then another calculation was made to see if you lived through your medical attention
Then another calculation was made to see if you were capable of fighting again at all
Then another calculation was made to see how much time you had until you were ready to fight
I think a lot of "enthusiasts" would be singing a different tune.
(I failed to note having the fear of the situation crippling you mentally as a factor, because it's just a game:)
A LOT of users of Windows XP have a passport account. Add in the users of MSN Messenger and Hotmail that don't use the other services. All of these people have Hotmail and MSN Messenger accounts, whether or not they actually use them.
Microsoft has a generic, net-ready, centralized authentication method that they can sell to others. They still win, however, even though they didn't sell it to many others. That's because it's generic (at least in the microsoft world), and net-ready - all their applications can use it even if no one else's does. Speaking as guy who maintains an app which controls multiple websites, this is a fairly trivial thing to implement - managing scaling is the largest concern. And after it's done, it's great from not only a maintenance standpoint but also a marketing one.
Cost:Benefit is good - taking a whole application like MS Office, their flagship product, and having it use centralized servers not only is a much larger problem on the scaling side of things, but "betting the farm" on an application that keeps dragging most people back kicking and screaming to microsoft would be utterly stupid.
Synopsis:
Passport = New, unproven idea that has benefits regardless of adoption
Office on MS Centralized servers = Old, proven idea fully migrated to new, unproven idea that has no benefits unless it's adopted.
Just because a lot of Open Source developers think that having a good idea and waiting for attention to come to it is marketing, doesn't mean that's how the rest of the world works. (Or heck - even OSS. Tons of great apps on sourceforge that never "grace the pages of slashdot")
When an application needs to be sold, reaching the widest audience is the goal - heck, oracle would build a DB-oriented OS if they thought they could sell it to enough new people to offset the development costs AND make a profit.
MS Bob was a huge mistake. Companies do that from time to time.
As much as I dislike Microsoft (said for the benefit of the software McCarthyists out there - don't mod me down! My karma might go from 'Excellent' to 'Good' for a day!) and the majority of their products, they have a giant market share and huge profits for a reason. Specific we can speculate about all day (and is a common tradition here on/.), but the fact is, they know how to run their business in a way that makes their share holders happy, and keeps bringing new share holders.
So it's collaborative, but not concurrent - I guess that solves a good portion of these problems, but may hamper workflow. I guess it's a decent trade-off, at least from the software developer's perspective.:)
I prefer firefox, not for any stupid idealistic or religious reason, but the fact that it doesn't spoon-feed me any more ads, I can extend the system to do what I want instead of having Opera developers tell me, "this is what I want", and the plethora of CSS bugs I find each time I test pages with it (that work in both Firefox and IE6 - two browsers which almost never work the same way), are the reasons I don't use Opera anymore.
For all it's faults, microsoft is simply not capable of being THAT stupid.
If you give Microsoft any benefit, they are very business-minded.
No company in their right mind is going to give microsoft the slightest hint of what is going on in their office without the company's explicit permission. If the phrase "trade secrets" don't phase you, Microsoft's reputation for what they do when they have these trade secrets available to them should be.
And the military uses Microsoft Office as well - yyyyyyeah.
This will probably run in most configurations on an intranet with VPN access for people who are on the road. This is not something that is going to be spewed via plaintext over the internet, or much less be stored anywhere but on company servers.
I think it's a great idea for their application - I'll be interested to see how it's pulled off, I have a couple of ideas which I imagine if they haven't already implemented I'm sure they at least explored, they are so obvious. Most of them involve features that.NET provides.
As for my team at work, I don't think we would be able to get much benefit from this - TWiki and mailing lists seem to give us enough time-wasters to endlessly pick apart each others' ideas.
I'm sincerely curious, how do they implement version conflicts? To be clear: when one person checks in something, and another person has work to check in, that doesn't contain the work of the first person and decides to check it in, even though it contains modifications that the first person has also modified, what happens?
Now, this is a fun enough problem for diff and merge, and can be a nightmare for the developer, and we're just talking about text.
When you get into laying out text, inline images, and all the other crap that a powerpoint presentation can have....
You're telling me that you won't let your kids play those kinds of games because of other people that might be in their group?
You ever try sitting down with your kids and explaining a little thing called "priorities" and "logic"? You know, teaching your kids that eating is just slightly more important than a number your kids use to identify what skills and powers are available to them for a fictional character they act out?
Heck, worse case, every try playing these games with them to eliminate the problem you describe?
If you show them how the game is played the right way (or at least, your vision of the right way), they're much less likely to play it the wrong way.
Just taking a guess, but it would be my perception that modifying that quote would only have one of two purposes: to get the attention of a group that wasn't there, or to avoid the attention of a group that is disliked by many.
In other words, modifications of this quote, as far as I can see - are politically motivated. Frankly, if one can not see between the lines, that this could apply to any group that strikes controversy amongst people, the point is lost anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Big deal - it doesn't make the game any more realistic, it just makes the game harder. I've been playing CS for quite some time - none of these things are new to me. Sure, I am more careful, but waiting 5 minutes to respawn is hardly a counter-argument to what I said. There have been times where I have made myself a target on a team with players better skilled to handle the situation, as to distract fire onto me and let them complete objectives or kill the opponents themselves. More often than not, I end up waiting 3-5 minutes to spawn.
It's obvious that you did not read anything past my mouse pointer analogy. Just like any job, people have to be in the right mindset for them to be effective workers. In the military, a lack of this mindset could cost a person it's life, or the life of others.
Bring a stopwatch to a gun safety class - when dealing with the unloaded rifles, point one at a class mate or even your instructor. Start the clock. Time how long it takes them to kick your ass out the door.
It's these kinds of things that I'm talking about. Even though I was around all sorts of pistols, rifles, hunting, and gun classes as a kid, nothing is effective as knowing what that stupid machine is really capable of. As a result, I haven't owned a gun for years, not seeing a reason to. I'm not saying that other people don't, just not me.
Playing a game for a few hours a night doesn't teach you how to effectively handle anything but that game. Real Life is consisted of ever-changing rules and possibilities, and until I can find a game that has a perfect model of real life, with no constraints, scripting, and perfect A.I., nothing will come close to substituting it.
Wow.
You disagree with him, so you insult him, make a point (filled with name calling), and then make a broad, generalized statement to finish out your point.
And you're supposed to be better than he is?
We have a running joke at the office...
Anytime someone refers to france or french anything, we rearchitect the statement to use the word "freedom" instead.
That publicity stunt did more to discredit the current administration for me than the whole "ashcroft covering lady liberty with a curtain" did on a symbolic scale.
I don't know where you get your information. Ted Turner? Hardly a conservative. Yet, he owns several networks. This has nothing to do with politics. Although you conspiracy theorists would like us to believe that "big media" is controlled by the right in order to convince us there isn't a liberal bias in the media (which there is).
Not that I agree with this bullshit conspiracy crap any more than you do, but Ted Turner was recently bellyaching about how he had no power over his networks anymore and that the credibility of them has gone down the toilet due to corporate corruption.
I'm pretty sure it was even featured on slashdot.
Yes, and firebombing Tokyo and Dresden were therefore purely defensive actions?
.5 acre of land then it also includes some CEO's 5 billion dollars of investments.
I think they've done a damn good job of keeping war from these parties off our soil.
We didn't enter World War II because of Pearl Harbor, just as we didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11. Both events were catalysts that allowed those in power to do what they had wanted to do all along.
Sad as it may be, it's pure speculation on both counts as of now. We have a lot more evidence that the latter fits your description, however.
To throw out another argument, though, at what point does "our soil" have to do with it? If americans have billions of dollars invested in a foreign nation, I'd that that the safety of those dollars matters as much to them as, say, the independence of one of our random territories. The military exists to back up our nation's best interests with force. I claim that, as repulsive as it sounds to me, if that includes my
Are you really trying to propose that you can put a price on human life?
Someone attacks the states - lives lost.
War is waged on a country that has some of our investments - lives lost.
Which is really the greater good? So that country just got a heck of a lot of money - and that's the last they'll get from us, unless an investor is a complete idiot. But at least some unrelated third-party marine doesn't get his life terminated because some dumbass poured a ton of money into a foreign market and got screwed.
And "our best interests", that's laughable at best. The very people who fight for us do not get to choose whether they fight after they have enlisted (and in some cases, not at all: see draft), however, they do have the choice to elect people who get to choose if they fight. Sounds like a raw deal to me.
Again, it is the Department of Defense. Not the Department of Defense of our best interests of those who are elected.
What's sad about all this crap is that not only is his political agenda not getting across because he's paying so much attention to it, his opponent's political agenda isn't getting across either.
As a result, if that's what they want me to pay attention to, I'm going to pay attention to the guy who's trying to get his viewpoints and solutions out there so at least if I don't agree with him 100%, I have a good idea of what he's going to do for the next 4 years.
I'll write in or vote for Nader, or no one at all - unless I start hearing things that give me the ability to consider the other candidates.
Do I care if that gives Bush another 4 years to fuck up this country? Nope. Kerry did it to himself and let down a whole political party (which consists of lot more voters than appointees), I'm not letting that guy get 4 years to do it. At least I know how Bush is going to let me down, and I make a slim chance for Nader to get elected less slim.
Of course, neither of the major parties are going to ever consider something like run off voting, which gives the voter more power at the poll booth.
I don't remember who for sure, but I'm pretty sure it was Al Gore who once said (a long, long time ago, and this is a paraphrase at best), "Democrats are elected by the poor, laws are created to help them get rich, and then they vote for Republicans."
While I have seen cases which confirm and deny this statement, it just goes to show that one cannot pigeon-hole anyone. It's very easy for someone to forget their roots, we see it all the time amongst celebrities.
... but does the fact that talking about a calculator and feeling the need to link to a definition of the concept of a factorial shed a not-so-positive light on the average intelligence of the person reading this article?
If they can take it without setting foot on our soil, more power to them. It's not our jurisdiction at that point, all we have to do is keep it from getting to them to stop the theft.
It's called the Department of Defense for a reason.
In WWII, we stayed out of the war (well, at least actively) until our own soil was threatened - for any of you that read history.
Korea, Viet Nam, Somalia, Iraq, and I'm sure a whole host of other conflicts that I have forgotten about have had nothing to do with the defense of our country. Often the defense of others are cited, sometimes the threat to our country has been fabricated, or at least, had at least a large enough reasonable doubt to cause the controversy they did.
So, maybe they should give these things to the "good guys", and keep them from the other team....
Of course, the game wouldn't do so well if that were the case.
Of course, jumping systems like that were introduced in old Half-Life mods like FLF.
The problem is, when you're bunny-hopping around like an idiot, the only penalty you get is that you're not bunny-hopping anymore. No lack of oxygen from exhausting yourself (and all the real penalties that come with that), and I imagine you can still run at full speed (or least if you can't, the time between not running at full speed and running at full speed is not long enough).
And of course, when you've been playing for 8 hours straight you don't feel any fatigue in-game.
and the best Counter-Strike players (well, at least the ones who are taking home the prizes) are in Sweden - says a lot about the gamers in the states.
Of course, if this had any bearing on a real combat situation it would be a concern.
The mental candy of video games can help to sweeten this awful task. If you look even casually at the top-selling shooters, they're nearly all war games that put the white American soldier-player in the heroic role of killing black, brown and yellow-skinned peoples to "stop terrorism," or "fight for freedom," or any of the other popular cant that our drooling politicians preach. These games are rehearsal chambers for more than killing technique: they incubate a poisonous right wing sensibility, the stuff of America Uber Alles that has plunged us into a senseless and unwinnable war in Iraq.
Wow, I play a ton of FPS games - I do recall killing a lot of germans in WWII games, but mostly aliens, monsters, and the occasional criminal.
The one game that I do play that fits your definition, Counter-Strike, came out 5 years before all this bullshit started hitting the fan.
Chances are you have good intentions (and I was with you in the first two sentences of your post), but the crux, the justification of your argument is not only incorrect and ignorant, I'm inclined to believe it's a lie.
So, while you lie in some places to preach your valid view, you send the signal to some that perhaps your view is a lie as well.
Don't sell yourself short. It's easy to make your argument without lying, so don't.
No disrespect to your service, but you're saying that -- in order to get people to join the military -- we should present it in the worst light possible?
YES!
If I were a recruiter, or someone telling recruiters how to recruit, I certainly wouldn't want some nitwit who thinks getting up after he gets shot is as easy as "moving his right index finger up and down". An exaggeration perhaps, but I guess I would want to be recruiting people that are very aware of the dangers of war - these people are more likely to be mentally prepared for situations that require it.
When we sit down to interview someone for our programming team, we give them a test in our primary language (filled with trick questions), then we go over that test with them. Being right all the time is not the goal, but how you accept the criticism you recieve is. Then questions are asked about your skills as a designer. While the person with "all the answers" is not only impossible to find (because 7 or more people are dredging the waters for the most obscure development knowledge they can think of), people with the ability to say, "I don't know, can you explain it?" are just as hard to find.
Some people walk out during the test, some people never call us back because they think they have to be a super-human to work here. We didn't want people like that anyways.
Everyone in our group has a willingness to learn and work with the team, and a set of knowledge that contributes to the team (whether or not they picked it up on the job is unimportant). They are proactive learners and require little to no hand-holding. They aren't afraid to read code and ask questions.
As far as our team is concerned, that's what makes a good developer. Judging that site traffic has at least doubled every year and our systems scale to do it, and that we've gone from a 5-man team to an 8-man team in nearly 4 years time, I think we're doing a pretty good job.
If I was in an infantry division, I'd be damn scared to be next to the guy who "joined because he'd get a free ride to college and played a video game that gave him a 'good idea' of what the army would be like". That guy is nothing more than a meat puppet with a rifle, is and more likely to get me killed than a dedicated soldier who knows what he's getting into.
Maybe wasting money on video game development and ads that will never convince me to join the service could be better used to provide ammo to you guys.
Also, these aren't cheap either: breast implants
You and I know these games aren't the first choices, but I dunno, it seems with all this stuff it's so easy to take that money and invest it in gel rounds (or whatever you guys use for "play ammo" these days), or even if it has to get that cheap, airsoft rifles, for crying out loud.
That's what really scares me about the military - all these ads, games, and propoganda glorify war in a way that makes it seem all so surreal... And of course, Dishonorable Discharge is one of the worst things anyone can have on their record, Court Marshal for be a deserter has even worse implications... Yet I have no guarantee that I will truly be "ready for combat" at the point that I am thrusted into it.
And since my chances of dying are significantly higher in the military than, say, staying home and playing Counter-Strike and working a civilian job to pay for my internet connection... Have fun!
I think a lot of "enthusiasts" would be singing a different tune.
(I failed to note having the fear of the situation crippling you mentally as a factor, because it's just a game
Oh no, you really got me there!
/.), but the fact is, they know how to run their business in a way that makes their share holders happy, and keeps bringing new share holders.
A LOT of users of Windows XP have a passport account. Add in the users of MSN Messenger and Hotmail that don't use the other services. All of these people have Hotmail and MSN Messenger accounts, whether or not they actually use them.
Microsoft has a generic, net-ready, centralized authentication method that they can sell to others. They still win, however, even though they didn't sell it to many others. That's because it's generic (at least in the microsoft world), and net-ready - all their applications can use it even if no one else's does. Speaking as guy who maintains an app which controls multiple websites, this is a fairly trivial thing to implement - managing scaling is the largest concern. And after it's done, it's great from not only a maintenance standpoint but also a marketing one.
Cost:Benefit is good - taking a whole application like MS Office, their flagship product, and having it use centralized servers not only is a much larger problem on the scaling side of things, but "betting the farm" on an application that keeps dragging most people back kicking and screaming to microsoft would be utterly stupid.
Synopsis:
Passport = New, unproven idea that has benefits regardless of adoption
Office on MS Centralized servers = Old, proven idea fully migrated to new, unproven idea that has no benefits unless it's adopted.
Just because a lot of Open Source developers think that having a good idea and waiting for attention to come to it is marketing, doesn't mean that's how the rest of the world works. (Or heck - even OSS. Tons of great apps on sourceforge that never "grace the pages of slashdot")
When an application needs to be sold, reaching the widest audience is the goal - heck, oracle would build a DB-oriented OS if they thought they could sell it to enough new people to offset the development costs AND make a profit.
MS Bob was a huge mistake. Companies do that from time to time.
As much as I dislike Microsoft (said for the benefit of the software McCarthyists out there - don't mod me down! My karma might go from 'Excellent' to 'Good' for a day!) and the majority of their products, they have a giant market share and huge profits for a reason. Specific we can speculate about all day (and is a common tradition here on
Ah, thanks.
:)
So it's collaborative, but not concurrent - I guess that solves a good portion of these problems, but may hamper workflow. I guess it's a decent trade-off, at least from the software developer's perspective.
Opera is a great piece of software.
I prefer firefox, not for any stupid idealistic or religious reason, but the fact that it doesn't spoon-feed me any more ads, I can extend the system to do what I want instead of having Opera developers tell me, "this is what I want", and the plethora of CSS bugs I find each time I test pages with it (that work in both Firefox and IE6 - two browsers which almost never work the same way), are the reasons I don't use Opera anymore.
I'm getting sick of this crap getting modded +5.
.NET provides.
For all it's faults, microsoft is simply not capable of being THAT stupid.
If you give Microsoft any benefit, they are very business-minded.
No company in their right mind is going to give microsoft the slightest hint of what is going on in their office without the company's explicit permission. If the phrase "trade secrets" don't phase you, Microsoft's reputation for what they do when they have these trade secrets available to them should be.
And the military uses Microsoft Office as well - yyyyyyeah.
This will probably run in most configurations on an intranet with VPN access for people who are on the road. This is not something that is going to be spewed via plaintext over the internet, or much less be stored anywhere but on company servers.
I think it's a great idea for their application - I'll be interested to see how it's pulled off, I have a couple of ideas which I imagine if they haven't already implemented I'm sure they at least explored, they are so obvious. Most of them involve features that
As for my team at work, I don't think we would be able to get much benefit from this - TWiki and mailing lists seem to give us enough time-wasters to endlessly pick apart each others' ideas.
I'm sincerely curious, how do they implement version conflicts? To be clear: when one person checks in something, and another person has work to check in, that doesn't contain the work of the first person and decides to check it in, even though it contains modifications that the first person has also modified, what happens?
:)
Now, this is a fun enough problem for diff and merge, and can be a nightmare for the developer, and we're just talking about text.
When you get into laying out text, inline images, and all the other crap that a powerpoint presentation can have....
Just curious.
I haven't been role playing for years, but wow.
You're telling me that you won't let your kids play those kinds of games because of other people that might be in their group?
You ever try sitting down with your kids and explaining a little thing called "priorities" and "logic"? You know, teaching your kids that eating is just slightly more important than a number your kids use to identify what skills and powers are available to them for a fictional character they act out?
Heck, worse case, every try playing these games with them to eliminate the problem you describe?
If you show them how the game is played the right way (or at least, your vision of the right way), they're much less likely to play it the wrong way.
God damn....
who cares.
It's a program for christ-sakes.
Just taking a guess, but it would be my perception that modifying that quote would only have one of two purposes: to get the attention of a group that wasn't there, or to avoid the attention of a group that is disliked by many.
In other words, modifications of this quote, as far as I can see - are politically motivated. Frankly, if one can not see between the lines, that this could apply to any group that strikes controversy amongst people, the point is lost anyway.
-Erik
Or everyone would just use some other search engine.