But the thing about garnering marketing leads through a website is that if the user can't see your site, they won't become a lead.
There's no way you can block off users and still know they would have contacted you, which makes situations like this impossible to use as a Big Stick to beat people with.
You're assuming they realise (even now!) that the approach is a stupid one, but even after much explaining, the official view is that it's a waste of time to support other browsers. The only reason I can get away with it is because it doesn't take much longer than writing straight for IE, and I use Firefox as a development platform (because it's manifestly more usable and has some really good developer extensions).
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying had Bush and FEMA got their acts together not one person would have died, or the hurricane would have missed NO. Whatever happens there would have been destruction, and people would likely have died.
However, when you've got the worst disaster in US history going, the army (and even National Guard!) are undermanned and bled dry from a protracted, possibly unwinnable (and certainly unpopular and ethically dubious) war, disaster-recovery funds will be harder to find because the economy's been run into the ground, the head of the federal agency responsible for dealing with exactly these kinds of disasters is a completely unqualified guy who only got the job because he's friends with the President, the president refuses all foreign aid for the disaster and delays any definite action for several days while he has a few rounds of golf on his ranch and sits and plays guitar, well... don't tell me that lives couldn't have been saved if he'd got off his arse, cut his vacation short and done something sooner.
I'm not even from the USA (I'm in the UK), and I've been outraged by Bush sitting on his thumbs for days, while people in NO too poor to leave die from lack of water, or from drinking water contaminated with toxic waste or raw sewage.
He was all over 9/11 when there was a clear enemy and political capital to be made from it. When it's merely a case of knuckling down and solving a problem, his true colours emerge - he's either dangerously incompetent or really doesn't give a fuck.
However, it was a borderline case, and it was hardly clear one way or the other - it could easily have been a serious comment from someone who values Expediency over Correctness, and as the discussions in this article have proven, there are a lot of them about, even on Slashdot.
"Workers" (programmers, sweat-shop labourers, etc) produce actual products for the company. Selling (/renting/leasing) these products makes the company rich.
I think everyone can agree that Managers don't directly produce anything - instead they're there to manage the people who do, hence the name "manager".
Surely, therefore, the job of a manager is to do everything he can to allow his workers to work (including procuring the resources they need from upper management, and taking decisions the employee needs answered), and otherwise to stay the hell out of their way.
So how do we end up in the situation where most managers I've met seem to take it as read that:
1) They know better than their employees 2) They can (and should) tell their employees how to do a job the manager has never done, or even understands 3) They should interfere in a project that's already going well, and expect their instructions to be heeded and followed, even when the employee knows better
Surely the role of "manager" should be like a good butler - there when you need them, and invisible when you don't. How have we ended up with so many wannabe-Napoleons that the very expectations of the role are now so warped?
This is indeed a consideration for any project. However, in this instance:
There was nobody else who spoke either language (or even anything like them) already in the company.
We're in a university town with a good CompSci dept. (and so - estimate - have probably more people who use Perl/PHP for web development than ASP.NET).
Speed of implementation was a priority, and I had (at the time) vastly more experience in Perl than ASP.NET.
This was for an isolated, public, marketing website - it wouldn't conceivably ever have to interoperate with any back-end systems already in-place, and what back-end systems we did have were due for re-writing from scratch anyway (we don't do "extensible architecture" here - we do "botch it quick and re-write when the requirements change").
The fact that the server the project had to sit on couldn't even support the.NET runtime without a hardware upgrade (it was ancient, and still running NT 4).
The choice of ASP.NET was motivated almost entirely by the MD (and another Director's) Microsoft fanboyism. By official edict we're even banned from investigating using non-MS servers, for anything, because the MD is paranoid that Microsoft would remove our Partner status for using a single non-MS server if they ever found out about it. Seriously.
Short version: You're totally right in what you say, but it doesn't apply in this case.
"Look, your job is to make it work, the way you were told. If it doesn't, it is your fault. That's why he's the boss and you aren't:"
Try again. Your job is to obey the guy signing your pay-cheques. If that's what the guy signing the pay-cheques thinks, any disagreement on your part (even for the greater good) will quickly result in no pay-cheques any more.
"No, you will get fired if it doesn't work. With a moron for a boss, you are in a no-win situation. Leave, or at least plan to leave. It is better to leave on your terms than his."
I dunno - in my experience it's better to argue firmly and sensibly with the stupid decision then abide by it - if the worst comes to the worst you can always cite your objections and claim you were "only obeying orders".
If you go off and do your own thing, even if it succeeds, you haven't proven that the boss's approach wouldn't have. Therefore you have definitely disobeyed an order for a possible better outcome. This leaves you no excuse and no way of demonstrating (to non-techncal people who really don't want to listen) that it would have gone wrong in the first place.
Plus, y'know, there's a certain evil sense of satisfaction in sitting back, doing what you're told and watching it all go to shit... <:-)
1) The MD (Managing Director) is the ultimate authority - he has no boss. He owns the majority (all?) of the company, so there's no going around him.
2) Even if it were possible to go over his head (or in many companies where it is), the culture is such that any conversation that includes the words "I did it differently to the way he wanted, but-" would result in an instant referral to the boss concerned, and a chewing-out for disobeying instructions.
As I said in a different post, the corporate culture (in my company, and many others) prioritises "obeying orders" over "correctness".
It doesn't matter if it all goes horribly wrong, as long as you were doing what you were told. Your boss is non-technical, so while you might attract a bit of flack for not explaining to him the potential consequences (even if you did), you'll be safe.
If you disobey an instruction, even if you save the day, you've proven yourself untrustworthy and a liability. But, of course, management wants all employees to be "empowered" and "take ownership of issues and projects"... <:-/
I tell you, it's like living in a Dilbert cartoon...
I'll grant you that - sometimes expediency does win out over "ideal" designs.
However, this doens't mean that there's no value in doing the job right as opposed to botching it/cutting down your options and having to redo it again later.
Re: your example, many people (myself included) find it faster and easier to hand-code HTML and write perl than to learn and use proprietary tools.
For example, from sufficient practice I'd be happy to bet I could knock up a web form in Perl/XHTML/CSS in about the same time you could do one in Visual Studio. The thing is, by the time I'd finished, the code would be leaner, download faster, be ranked higher by search engines (a very real consideration when doing marketing websites), and would work on any browser right down to smartphones.
If there's then an unforeseen requirement (like opening your interface to the world), who's in the bettr position? The guy who took some extra time but who can now go live without any changes, or the guy who now has to re-implement his entire solution (your estimated time: weeks), in addition to the time he spent hacking it together in the first place?
Obviously it's a trade-off, but I still firmly believe the judgement call should be made by the guy who's trained and qualified to make such a call, not someone who is neither, but is nevertheless in a position of authority over them.
You're familiar with the saying: "Faster, Better, Cheaper: Choose any two"?
Bosses (in my experience) invariably choose Faster and Cheaper, because it delivers short-term gains and requires no knowledge of the problem.
Engineers prioritise Better, because while you don't get Faster up-front, ultimately you get Better, Cheaper and Faster, if the requirements change even a little bit during the entire usage-lifetime of the code.
If someone else tells him. If he happens to poke around in any way, and finds something that seems odd. If anyone remotely technical apart from you looks at the work, who doesn't:
i) Already agree the guy's a fuckwit
ii) Already know you lied to him and covered it up
iii) Agree it's ok to lie to your boss, and
iv) Have nothing to gain by showing the boss he's been lied to.
Once he gets suspicious you have to lie again to cover that. And at the very least he's going to be suspicious from now on, so you're less likely to get away with anything (possibly, more important) in the future.
Basically, once you lie to him once, you'd better be fucking sure he's never, ever going to find out about it. See my earlier point about "it'll never happen" scenarios;-)
"2) If it works, why will he bother?"
Some people place a higher priority on "being obeyed" than on "things working".
They probably justify it to themselves that if they can't trust the employee to do whatever you want, no matter how insane, pointless or counter-productive, then you can't trust the employee, period.
The people are generally paranoid, uneducated in the relevant field, prone to micromanagement, fucking control freaks, and, overwhelmingly, bosses.
"3) You'll give yourself an ulcer if you keep bending over like that"
Well, no ulcers yet, but several bald patches on my head from tearing hair out, yes.
"4) If you let the insane define reality, then your reality will be insane"
Oh, do you work here? What are the odds?;-)
"5) NEVER get into a position where you *need* the job. Build up, save a little, keep within your means and you can kiss a stupid job goodbye (note: if you get sacked because you didn't apply the required solution, but still got the result, you will get severance and dole)."
That's a lovely idea, but unfortunately, with the state of higher education in the UK, you're lucky to come out of your first degree without at least a £10,000 debt. A good first job in computing in my area is £16,000-£18,000. It can take a long while to dig yourself out of the hole, and you'd better quickly get used to getting fucked in the arse on the way...:-(
Also, a note: I don't know where you're from, but here in the UK disobeying any reasonable request from your boss can easily end up as "Gross Misconduct". Getting sacked is also no guarantee you'll immediately get the dole, and the dole doesn't cover things like a car (essential to find a new job), university loan repayments, lack of a recent reference for your CV, etc.
Bush appoints the (completely unqualified, but old-boy friend of Bush) head of FEMA.
The head of FEMA is responsible for his organisation.
FEMA fucks up royally, in everything from its response to the New Orleans disaster to stupid piddling stuff like unnecessarily rejecting non IE-browsers on its website (which, nevertheless, can cause additional hassle and stress for people already destitute, financially ruined and recently-bereaved).
Damn straight Bush should carry the can for the whole fuck-up. He should resign, step down or be impeached for fucking the country until it can't respond to a simple natural disaster that everyone saw coming hours or days (weeks?) away. Not to start a right vs. left flamewar, but frankly I wouldn't be averse to seeing him do jail-time for the damage he's caused to your country.
The director of FEMA should resign immediately, since he's proven himself unable to do his job. He should emphatically not just be "golden parachuted" or shifted to another sinecure. He fucked up, let him find a new bloody job.
The guy responsible for the retarded website policy should have his knuckles rapped. He should have known better, and he's likely caused a lot of extra hassle for the last people in the country who need extra shit right now.
See, if you can't hold bosses responsible for the actions of their subordinates, what the fuck kind of restraints are there on them?
It's statements like that which suggest you probably do.
And (unless you're some kind of super-genius at every task they do) will be utterly despised by the poor fuckers who work under you.
Say it with me: Unecessarily restricting your options is a Bad Thing. Vendor lock-in is a Bad Thing. Proprietary/nonstandard/deliberately-non-interoper able solutions almost always come back to bite you in the arse, which is a Bad Thing. Assuming you'll know the every single requirement placed on your system for the entire future of its lifetime is impossible, hubristic and stupid. This is a Bad Thing.
Designing to open standards, avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in and maximising interoperability are Good Things.
Exactly. I started my current job a little over a year ago, maintaining and developing a public website for a multimillion-pound company.
The MD is a raving MS fanboy, and shortly after arriving I was informed in no small measure that I was developing for IE, and "if the site doesn't work in any of those other browsers, who cares".
(One of the funny things is, we actually produce Mac versions of some of our products, but the MD apparently doesn't care that most of those users wouldn't be able to see our site (or assumes they'll download IE/Mac, because it's Microsoft, so it must always be the best option).)
Happily (and because my boss(es) don't know any better), I've coded everything to standards and used a few quick CSS/markup hacks to get everything still looking nice in IE.
Since I started we've had three "it'll never happen" situations with (potentially extremely profitable) users using different browsers or OSes, and happily the site's worked perfectly for them.
We've also had one "it'll never happen" situation where I did actually give in and do it the way the Board specified (dynamic content served by ASP.NET instead of Perl, on a server too old to support ASP.NET reliably). Because our (cheap, crappy) hosting contract is on a Linux machine, we have to host all ASP.NET content on another (in-house) server, and seamlessly (heh, make that "as seamlessly as we can") transfer users between the main part of the site (static HTML on Apache/Linux) and the dynamic pages (ASP.NET/Windows Server).
Predictably enough the tiny pipe into the inhouse servers went down, and we ended up with a convoluted sequence of events that lead to us needing to host an ASP.NET page on the (external) Linux server. Due to the crappiness of the hosting contract they were unable to offer (or the MD was unwilling to pay) for the service, so the site had huge sections missing for several days, mostly important advertising campaign landing-pages which provide the majority of marketing leads for the company.
Had I been allowed to develop the content in the language I specified (Perl/PHP, simply for the portability), this would never have happened - we could have transferred the dynamic pages to the Linux server at no extra cost (in fact they would probably have already been there), and the site would have carried on as normal.
The morals of the story are this:
Never disobey your boss on technical matters, even when he has no fucking clue what he's babbling about. That's how you get fired.
If you can possibly obey the letter of his instructions (but disobey the spirit) and do it the right way, go for it - just cover your arse and don't spend an unreasonable amount of extra time.
People who know nothing about technical matters should let their fucking techies make technical decisions. You pay them for a reason, and if anyone could do their job why not fire them and hire a schoolkid for a fraction of the money?
"It'll never happen" scenarios pop up 100% of the time, given enough time. Your techies know this, and will sensibly plan for it. With sufficiently good techies (and budget) you never suffer the consequences of a bad technical decision, so you don't and won't.
In other words, get good techies, then get the fuck out of the way and let them do their job.
When the bloody thing works one tenth as reliably as the TCP/IP connection on my box, on a home LAN, with only WinXP Home and Pro connected to it, then I'll give them credit for a job well done.
At the moment, with the frequent unreasonably slow transfers and random now-you-see-it-now-you-don't Windows Networking connections to my flatmate's machines (in the next room!), I reserve my right to grouch about it.
I don't know if its the implementation or the design that sucks, but MS are responsible for both of them, and boy do they suck.
It is irreparable harm, but to Microsoft's monopoly and uncontested dominance of the entire PC industry.
Thus, "irreparable harm" is not always a bad thing.
In addition, Microsoft have had a stranglehold on the world's standard PC platform for so long, it's doubtful if they could compete on a level playing field any more - look at ActiveX (the last time they tried to monopolise a new area or medium, in this case rich content on the web). ActiveX has flopped on its arse, in spite of IE's effective monopoly on the browser market, because technologically (and security-wise) it's simply shite.
Vista's another case in point - overblown, over-hyped, stuck in development hell for years, and missing every feature that would make it worth upgrading at launch.
TBH I wouldnt' be surprised if forcing Microsoft to interoperate was the beginning of the end for the company. When forced to play fairly they seem incapable of winning these days...
IIRC, this is all they're being asked to provide - documentation on their protocols, interfaces and APIs.
The confusion between this and the actual "source code" was introduced by MS and their lawyers, because saying "they want to look at our Intellectual Property" sounds a lot more sympathetic than "they want us to give competitors the merest chance of interoperating with our software".
Microsoft wasn't sanctioned for "bundling software with their OS". They were sanctioned for "illegally misusing their existing monopoly to extend it into other areas", a long-established prtoection against monopolies.
It so happens they did this by bundling software with their OS, but "how they comitted the crime" != "the crime itself".
For an easier example, being handed money by a bank teller isn't a crime, but if I run in there with a gun, wave it in their faces and demand all the money in the safe, that's certainly not legal.
When you're a monopoly you have an unreasonable amount of power to have invested in any one entity, so additional restrictions apply than apply to organisations with less power. In the same way a couple of hundred years ago we needed specific rules limiting the power of the monarchy in England - normal people weren't told "before you approve a change in the law you need to consult Parliament" (or similar), because normal people can't change the law.
"Incidentally, you CAN remove apps such as Media Player, IE, and even Paint by going to Add or Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components. Mind, I've never met anyone who's bothered, but I've never met anyone who's ditched Quicktime on their Mac either..."
"Even Paint"? Actually, Paint should be one of the easiest things to remove, since it's a trivial, self-contained application. IE and WMP (in contrast) are collections of software components, which are (intentionally) tightly integrated into the Windows shell. While you might be able to easily get rid of the Start menu item (or even a specific.exe file), removing all the hooks and controls they dump all over your Windows systenm (and which other programs then use) is a nightmare of a job, if it's even possible for an end-user.
For an empirical demonstration of this, why did it take so long for MS to produce a WMP-free version of windows? Surely if you're right they chould have just disabled the WMP option in the Windows install, total time taken ~ 5 minutes? As it was they spent ages on it, and only released it so close to the deadline everyone thought the fines would start kicking in before they did.
And IE? Microsoft actually claimed it was impossible to remove "IE" from "Windows" during their US antitrust case. Sure, they had a good reason to perjure themselves at the time, but they were taking a fuck of a risk if it's as simple as turning off an install option.
Re:Dealing with the unknown..
on
Microsoft Sues EU
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The EU invests much more power in unelected bureaucrats (and much less in elected officials) than the US system. Thus it's far, far easier to corrupt because one only has to buy out a member once, not every four years, and blatantly corrupt individuals are far harder to replace.
However, the EU also has lots of little voices, any one of whom can speak up and block or delay legislation. When the little guys can speak up it's an excellent system (c.f. Poland on software patents), but often deals are done between the largest players (who tend also to be the most corrupt), and the little guys are railroaded into going along with it. Then it's even easier to corrupt than the US system.
The EU also (historically) has a much stronger anti-corporate slant than the US, although it'll be interesting to see how long this lasts now there's a single powerful entity in Europe for corporations to cozy up to.
In short, the structure of the EU is far more corruptable, but the people are starting from a more anti-corporate position. If the people stay strong the EU will be protected against the most rapacious attempts on their rights - however, if the people drop the ball the EU will be in the pocket of coroporations faster than the US.
Basically, in the great race to a facist totalitarian police state we've got better acceleration, but we're starting from further behind.
Incidentally, has anyone seen the The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism? Very, very, very scary. Apart (possibly) from point 5 ( "Rampant sexism"), it looks like a shopping list of the current US political system (and point 5 does go on to specify specifics like "adamantly anti-abortion", "homophobic" and "draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country", all of which sound pretty familiar to me...
I've never used Microsoft Student, but from perusing their site it just looks like a lobotomised version of Works, with a kiddy-friendly frontend. It might be great for kids, but it's not news. Is it a new development? No. Does it extend the bounds of human knowledge? No. Is it an interesting project other people can contribute to or get involved with? No. Is it even a charitable effort? No, it costs.
It may indeed be a "nice" application, but this is hardly news. "Man bites dog" is news - "man pats dog on head and gives him a bone" isn't. It's hardly fair to blame/. for a fundamental aspect of humanity - we find bad news fascinating, and good news only vaguely interesting. Likewise, "Company X breaks law, is convicted, then uses punishment to its advantage" is interesting. "Company X produces a not-bad product" is not. There are sites which publish these kinds of articles - they're called press-release aggregators. Why are you reading slashdot if all you want is uncritical product announcements?
As for the/. crowd's general anti-MS slant, that's what you get when you get a bunch of engineers, hackers and nerds who value things like technological advance, openness, freedom of action, privacy and decentralisation... and a company that does everything it can to hide or lock away its intellectual property, sues reverse-engineerers, slanders (and knowingly lies about) competitors, unnecessarily locks users into their systems, lobotomises and unnecessarily centralises their own products to retain control over their userbase, has been known to invade their users' privacy, and has abused their illegal monopoly position to actively retarded technological advancement in computing when it's to the benefit of their bottom line.
It's also important to note that Slashdot does report when Microsoft does something good - I've read stories abot the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable donations, and several other (more Microsoft-related) stories.
True, even in the comments sections of these stories there's often a lot of carping from/. users, but users != editors. The editors are reporting the stories, even if the users don't necessarily like MS as a result. Why don't slashdot users like MS? For all the reasons listed at the beginning of my post.
The thing is, they only do charitable things where it doesn't affect their profit one cent, and for every one small thing they do that's charitable or good, they're caught doing ten or twenty things that shit all over developers, competitors, the law or their own users.
The disparity between the numbers of "good" and "bad" Microsoft stories is more a reflection of their actions than necessarily of bias in the Slashdot editors.
We hear a lot more stories about Microsoft shitting on people, because they spend a lot more of their time shitting on people, simple as that.
True, the web provide a much more fertile ground for rumours, gossip and flash-mobs of all kinds, but this is only a side-effect - the internet it primarily good for propagating memes.
All memes are spread more easily via the web than ever before, which does mean we get more rumours and gossip-presented-as-fact (bad). However, it also means we get more news, grass-roots activism, whistle-blowers and whack-a-mole style propagation of information certain entities (corporations, governments, etc) would rather keep under wraps (very, very, very good).
The problem is many people are still too credulous and inexperienced with this sudden explosion of information they encounter, and haven't developed defence mechanisms yet. This can be easily demonstrated when people first get access - initially they're clueless, naive and obey anything that looks like an instruction ("Click here to stop spyware! Warning: New Virus melts your hard-drive and explodes your toes - forward to everyone you know! Stop $$$pam fast!"). After a few weeks (or family-members beating them about the head and neck) they learn to be more discriminating - they don't forward hoax virus alerts, don't buy stuff from spam, and don't click on irritating advert images that look like Windows dialog boxes.
In the same way "bad" mechanisms have developed to take advantage of this new meme-carrying capacity (spammers, virus hoaxes, etc), we're also starting to see society-level defences and counter-memes against them evolving too - snopes.com, spam/popup filters, the idea you should never buy anything from spam, etc.
The population's information-landscape has changed beyond recognition in (for most of them) less than decade, and it's taking time for them to catch up, that's all.
Of course, along with this incredible boon of information and opportunity there's the concomitant risk - people only reading things which confirm their existing opinions and prejudices. This ultimately leads to groups with different perceptions of reality - "Iraq is nearly over and Bush is the saviour of the US" vs "Bush has fucked the country and Iraq is worse than Vietnam", for example. Communication becomes very difficult between both groups since there's a smaller and smaller amount of common understanding between them, and without some shared values to start from agreement on anything is highly unlikely.
We're starting to see the effects of this with the ongoing culture war (don't flame me, I didn't coin the term) in the US - it's all too easy for people to only read left-wing blogs, or to watch Fox news and believe everything, simply because it makes them feel better than being exposed to other, outside viewpoints.
However, this is a choice for the individual - do you seek out and test alternative viewpoints, thereby testing your own, or do you only stick with sources that agree with you, sinking into intellectual masturbation?
The technology's just there - it's up to us how we use it.
By bosses think HTML is an alternative for Photoshop (for advertising material/graphic design), or for Visual Basic (for user-interfaces). They just can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you produce the content, and let the user-agent decide how best to display it - as far as they're concerned, they'd rather shut out a significant proportion of their userbase, simply to allow them to specify designs down to the pixel.
And I'm not joking about the Visual Basic (multi-million pound company, and half of our products are written in VB <:-) - they want pixel-perfect positioning (which is no joke when designing to standards and supporting IE). The entire company seems to view X/HTML/CSS's variability as a source of annoyance, rather than its single most important feature.
Just last week I had to take a carefully-designed flow-layout page and recode the CSS to make it fixed-width, absolute positioning, at 1024x768 pixels wide.
Why? Because the Director of Customer Support has a large monitor, and didn't like the fact re-flowed (to keep everything on the screen!) when people browsed in smaller windows. When I pointed out that, although the page wouldn't re-flow for anyone running at a resolution under 1024x768 (>25% of our userbase), it would mean they have to sideways-scroll every time they reached theend of a line. His answer: "Yeah, well, frankly we don't care about selling to anyone running smaller resolutions than mine". Odd, I thought we wanted to sell to anyone who'd buy... but I guess that's why he's the Director and I'm the guy on probably a third of what he's earning...
And why was the Director of Customer Support involved in a marketing website decision? It's just that sort of company.
Vista (unbelievably) might not be much good. (Shock, horror!)
XBox 360, by not necessarily having a hard drive, makes console development, which traditionally can't depend on having hard drive, harder. That makes sense.
Sony's fundamentally different chip design requires different programming techniques, and might be harder to port. Waaaah!
However, this fundamentally different chip design isn't designed to speed up processing, distribute tasks more effectively or demonstrate an important and new approach to general-purpose computing... no, it's solely to ensure vendor lock-in to Sony. No, really.
Steam solves all these problems (next-gen games being hard to develop, consoles lacking hard drives, different chip designs needing new skills, and Sony evilly locking us in to their own architecture), without in any way having anything to do with any of them. Steam good. Buy Steam. Buy it now.
I'm not saying he doesn't have the odd point, but does anyone else find Gabe Newell's pronouncements more and more whiny? Far from the industry god that brought us HL, now he's verging on sounding pathetic. Oooh, help, help, next-gen development is hard... radically different processor architectures require different programming techniques... oooh... lacking non-standard console peripherals makes console programming hard... oooh.
Gabe? We know. Sit down. It isn't going to change because you're whining about it in every interview you give.
And the last paragraph really was the limit - suggesting Steam (a new distribution system) would really have any fucking efect on the actual problems he'd raised? It's a billing and download service, not a fucking hard-drive, and not a middleware layer for the PS3. What were they smoking in the interview, and WTF does a bloody Steam advert have to do with the actual issues they talked about?
I'd say Gabe should come back to developing PC games, but frankly if a missing-or-not hard drive is twisting his nuts these days, god only knows what he'd think trying to develop for the heterogenous PC platform again...
On the other hand, maybe the perception that this is a new situation might help change Bush's retarded climate-change policies (basically, "putting our hands over our ears and chanting 'Lalalalalalalala-I-can't-hear-you-lalalalalaaaaa' ").
It's easy to ignore "climate change leads to less predictable, more extreme weather" when it's just hordes of little brown asian people who're getting their houseboats smashed to shit.
It's a little harder to pretend climate-change is rubbish when it's thousands of voting, tax-paying, cared-about, primarily black-African-Americans on the sharp end of it, right?
Indeed. I always preferred the seventh definition offered in the jargon file:
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
since this seems to me to be the closest to the spirit of hacking. Hell, I know some talented hardware hackers that would rule out any definition restricting "hacking" to software (as many definitions do). In fact, I know plenty of people with the hacker nature who've never touched a computer.
Likewise, the best definition for "a hack" I ever saw was roughly:
Hack: The appropriate application of ingenuity
Likewise, hacking would then become "appropriately applying ingenuity", and a hacker would be "one who applies ingenuity appropriately".
Slashdot Mirror
But the thing about garnering marketing leads through a website is that if the user can't see your site, they won't become a lead.
There's no way you can block off users and still know they would have contacted you, which makes situations like this impossible to use as a Big Stick to beat people with.
You're assuming they realise (even now!) that the approach is a stupid one, but even after much explaining, the official view is that it's a waste of time to support other browsers. The only reason I can get away with it is because it doesn't take much longer than writing straight for IE, and I use Firefox as a development platform (because it's manifestly more usable and has some really good developer extensions).
Congrats - hopefully as a result of my ranting you might avoid the kind of mistakes that make underlings wish your untimely demise ;-)
Nah, I didn't get the "GBTW", and still don't. I subconsciously wrote it off as a cryptic sig and ignored it.</embarrassed>
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying had Bush and FEMA got their acts together not one person would have died, or the hurricane would have missed NO. Whatever happens there would have been destruction, and people would likely have died.
However, when you've got the worst disaster in US history going, the army (and even National Guard!) are undermanned and bled dry from a protracted, possibly unwinnable (and certainly unpopular and ethically dubious) war, disaster-recovery funds will be harder to find because the economy's been run into the ground, the head of the federal agency responsible for dealing with exactly these kinds of disasters is a completely unqualified guy who only got the job because he's friends with the President, the president refuses all foreign aid for the disaster and delays any definite action for several days while he has a few rounds of golf on his ranch and sits and plays guitar, well... don't tell me that lives couldn't have been saved if he'd got off his arse, cut his vacation short and done something sooner.
I'm not even from the USA (I'm in the UK), and I've been outraged by Bush sitting on his thumbs for days, while people in NO too poor to leave die from lack of water, or from drinking water contaminated with toxic waste or raw sewage.
He was all over 9/11 when there was a clear enemy and political capital to be made from it. When it's merely a case of knuckling down and solving a problem, his true colours emerge - he's either dangerously incompetent or really doesn't give a fuck.
If so, I apologise to him profusely.
However, it was a borderline case, and it was hardly clear one way or the other - it could easily have been a serious comment from someone who values Expediency over Correctness, and as the discussions in this article have proven, there are a lot of them about, even on Slashdot.
I've been thinking about exactly this recently.
"Workers" (programmers, sweat-shop labourers, etc) produce actual products for the company. Selling (/renting/leasing) these products makes the company rich.
I think everyone can agree that Managers don't directly produce anything - instead they're there to manage the people who do, hence the name "manager".
Surely, therefore, the job of a manager is to do everything he can to allow his workers to work (including procuring the resources they need from upper management, and taking decisions the employee needs answered), and otherwise to stay the hell out of their way.
So how do we end up in the situation where most managers I've met seem to take it as read that:
1) They know better than their employees
2) They can (and should) tell their employees how to do a job the manager has never done, or even understands
3) They should interfere in a project that's already going well, and expect their instructions to be heeded and followed, even when the employee knows better
Surely the role of "manager" should be like a good butler - there when you need them, and invisible when you don't. How have we ended up with so many wannabe-Napoleons that the very expectations of the role are now so warped?
This is indeed a consideration for any project. However, in this instance:
.NET runtime without a hardware upgrade (it was ancient, and still running NT 4).
There was nobody else who spoke either language (or even anything like them) already in the company.
We're in a university town with a good CompSci dept. (and so - estimate - have probably more people who use Perl/PHP for web development than ASP.NET).
Speed of implementation was a priority, and I had (at the time) vastly more experience in Perl than ASP.NET.
This was for an isolated, public, marketing website - it wouldn't conceivably ever have to interoperate with any back-end systems already in-place, and what back-end systems we did have were due for re-writing from scratch anyway (we don't do "extensible architecture" here - we do "botch it quick and re-write when the requirements change").
The fact that the server the project had to sit on couldn't even support the
The choice of ASP.NET was motivated almost entirely by the MD (and another Director's) Microsoft fanboyism. By official edict we're even banned from investigating using non-MS servers, for anything, because the MD is paranoid that Microsoft would remove our Partner status for using a single non-MS server if they ever found out about it. Seriously.
Short version: You're totally right in what you say, but it doesn't apply in this case.
"Look, your job is to make it work, the way you were told. If it doesn't, it is your fault. That's why he's the boss and you aren't:"
Try again. Your job is to obey the guy signing your pay-cheques. If that's what the guy signing the pay-cheques thinks, any disagreement on your part (even for the greater good) will quickly result in no pay-cheques any more.
"No, you will get fired if it doesn't work. With a moron for a boss, you are in a no-win situation. Leave, or at least plan to leave. It is better to leave on your terms than his."
I dunno - in my experience it's better to argue firmly and sensibly with the stupid decision then abide by it - if the worst comes to the worst you can always cite your objections and claim you were "only obeying orders".
If you go off and do your own thing, even if it succeeds, you haven't proven that the boss's approach wouldn't have. Therefore you have definitely disobeyed an order for a possible better outcome. This leaves you no excuse and no way of demonstrating (to non-techncal people who really don't want to listen) that it would have gone wrong in the first place.
Plus, y'know, there's a certain evil sense of satisfaction in sitting back, doing what you're told and watching it all go to shit... <:-)
You seem to misunderstand two points:
1) The MD (Managing Director) is the ultimate authority - he has no boss. He owns the majority (all?) of the company, so there's no going around him.
2) Even if it were possible to go over his head (or in many companies where it is), the culture is such that any conversation that includes the words "I did it differently to the way he wanted, but-" would result in an instant referral to the boss concerned, and a chewing-out for disobeying instructions.
As I said in a different post, the corporate culture (in my company, and many others) prioritises "obeying orders" over "correctness".
It doesn't matter if it all goes horribly wrong, as long as you were doing what you were told. Your boss is non-technical, so while you might attract a bit of flack for not explaining to him the potential consequences (even if you did), you'll be safe.
If you disobey an instruction, even if you save the day, you've proven yourself untrustworthy and a liability. But, of course, management wants all employees to be "empowered" and "take ownership of issues and projects"... <:-/
I tell you, it's like living in a Dilbert cartoon...
I'll grant you that - sometimes expediency does win out over "ideal" designs.
However, this doens't mean that there's no value in doing the job right as opposed to botching it/cutting down your options and having to redo it again later.
Re: your example, many people (myself included) find it faster and easier to hand-code HTML and write perl than to learn and use proprietary tools.
For example, from sufficient practice I'd be happy to bet I could knock up a web form in Perl/XHTML/CSS in about the same time you could do one in Visual Studio. The thing is, by the time I'd finished, the code would be leaner, download faster, be ranked higher by search engines (a very real consideration when doing marketing websites), and would work on any browser right down to smartphones.
If there's then an unforeseen requirement (like opening your interface to the world), who's in the bettr position? The guy who took some extra time but who can now go live without any changes, or the guy who now has to re-implement his entire solution (your estimated time: weeks), in addition to the time he spent hacking it together in the first place?
Obviously it's a trade-off, but I still firmly believe the judgement call should be made by the guy who's trained and qualified to make such a call, not someone who is neither, but is nevertheless in a position of authority over them.
You're familiar with the saying: "Faster, Better, Cheaper: Choose any two"?
Bosses (in my experience) invariably choose Faster and Cheaper, because it delivers short-term gains and requires no knowledge of the problem.
Engineers prioritise Better, because while you don't get Faster up-front, ultimately you get Better, Cheaper and Faster, if the requirements change even a little bit during the entire usage-lifetime of the code.
"1) How will he tell?"
;-)
;-)
:-(
If someone else tells him. If he happens to poke around in any way, and finds something that seems odd. If anyone remotely technical apart from you looks at the work, who doesn't:
i) Already agree the guy's a fuckwit
ii) Already know you lied to him and covered it up
iii) Agree it's ok to lie to your boss, and
iv) Have nothing to gain by showing the boss he's been lied to.
Once he gets suspicious you have to lie again to cover that. And at the very least he's going to be suspicious from now on, so you're less likely to get away with anything (possibly, more important) in the future.
Basically, once you lie to him once, you'd better be fucking sure he's never, ever going to find out about it. See my earlier point about "it'll never happen" scenarios
"2) If it works, why will he bother?"
Some people place a higher priority on "being obeyed" than on "things working".
They probably justify it to themselves that if they can't trust the employee to do whatever you want, no matter how insane, pointless or counter-productive, then you can't trust the employee, period.
The people are generally paranoid, uneducated in the relevant field, prone to micromanagement, fucking control freaks, and, overwhelmingly, bosses.
"3) You'll give yourself an ulcer if you keep bending over like that"
Well, no ulcers yet, but several bald patches on my head from tearing hair out, yes.
"4) If you let the insane define reality, then your reality will be insane"
Oh, do you work here? What are the odds?
"5) NEVER get into a position where you *need* the job. Build up, save a little, keep within your means and you can kiss a stupid job goodbye (note: if you get sacked because you didn't apply the required solution, but still got the result, you will get severance and dole)."
That's a lovely idea, but unfortunately, with the state of higher education in the UK, you're lucky to come out of your first degree without at least a £10,000 debt. A good first job in computing in my area is £16,000-£18,000. It can take a long while to dig yourself out of the hole, and you'd better quickly get used to getting fucked in the arse on the way...
Also, a note: I don't know where you're from, but here in the UK disobeying any reasonable request from your boss can easily end up as "Gross Misconduct". Getting sacked is also no guarantee you'll immediately get the dole, and the dole doesn't cover things like a car (essential to find a new job), university loan repayments, lack of a recent reference for your CV, etc.
Bush appoints the (completely unqualified, but old-boy friend of Bush) head of FEMA.
The head of FEMA is responsible for his organisation.
FEMA fucks up royally, in everything from its response to the New Orleans disaster to stupid piddling stuff like unnecessarily rejecting non IE-browsers on its website (which, nevertheless, can cause additional hassle and stress for people already destitute, financially ruined and recently-bereaved).
Damn straight Bush should carry the can for the whole fuck-up. He should resign, step down or be impeached for fucking the country until it can't respond to a simple natural disaster that everyone saw coming hours or days (weeks?) away. Not to start a right vs. left flamewar, but frankly I wouldn't be averse to seeing him do jail-time for the damage he's caused to your country.
The director of FEMA should resign immediately, since he's proven himself unable to do his job. He should emphatically not just be "golden parachuted" or shifted to another sinecure. He fucked up, let him find a new bloody job.
The guy responsible for the retarded website policy should have his knuckles rapped. He should have known better, and he's likely caused a lot of extra hassle for the last people in the country who need extra shit right now.
See, if you can't hold bosses responsible for the actions of their subordinates, what the fuck kind of restraints are there on them?
It's statements like that which suggest you probably do.
r able solutions almost always come back to bite you in the arse, which is a Bad Thing.
And (unless you're some kind of super-genius at every task they do) will be utterly despised by the poor fuckers who work under you.
Say it with me:
Unecessarily restricting your options is a Bad Thing.
Vendor lock-in is a Bad Thing.
Proprietary/nonstandard/deliberately-non-interope
Assuming you'll know the every single requirement placed on your system for the entire future of its lifetime is impossible, hubristic and stupid. This is a Bad Thing.
Designing to open standards, avoiding unnecessary vendor lock-in and maximising interoperability are Good Things.
Any questions?
Exactly. I started my current job a little over a year ago, maintaining and developing a public website for a multimillion-pound company.
The MD is a raving MS fanboy, and shortly after arriving I was informed in no small measure that I was developing for IE, and "if the site doesn't work in any of those other browsers, who cares".
(One of the funny things is, we actually produce Mac versions of some of our products, but the MD apparently doesn't care that most of those users wouldn't be able to see our site (or assumes they'll download IE/Mac, because it's Microsoft, so it must always be the best option).)
Happily (and because my boss(es) don't know any better), I've coded everything to standards and used a few quick CSS/markup hacks to get everything still looking nice in IE.
Since I started we've had three "it'll never happen" situations with (potentially extremely profitable) users using different browsers or OSes, and happily the site's worked perfectly for them.
We've also had one "it'll never happen" situation where I did actually give in and do it the way the Board specified (dynamic content served by ASP.NET instead of Perl, on a server too old to support ASP.NET reliably). Because our (cheap, crappy) hosting contract is on a Linux machine, we have to host all ASP.NET content on another (in-house) server, and seamlessly (heh, make that "as seamlessly as we can") transfer users between the main part of the site (static HTML on Apache/Linux) and the dynamic pages (ASP.NET/Windows Server).
Predictably enough the tiny pipe into the inhouse servers went down, and we ended up with a convoluted sequence of events that lead to us needing to host an ASP.NET page on the (external) Linux server. Due to the crappiness of the hosting contract they were unable to offer (or the MD was unwilling to pay) for the service, so the site had huge sections missing for several days, mostly important advertising campaign landing-pages which provide the majority of marketing leads for the company.
Had I been allowed to develop the content in the language I specified (Perl/PHP, simply for the portability), this would never have happened - we could have transferred the dynamic pages to the Linux server at no extra cost (in fact they would probably have already been there), and the site would have carried on as normal.
The morals of the story are this:
Never disobey your boss on technical matters, even when he has no fucking clue what he's babbling about. That's how you get fired.
If you can possibly obey the letter of his instructions (but disobey the spirit) and do it the right way, go for it - just cover your arse and don't spend an unreasonable amount of extra time.
People who know nothing about technical matters should let their fucking techies make technical decisions. You pay them for a reason, and if anyone could do their job why not fire them and hire a schoolkid for a fraction of the money?
"It'll never happen" scenarios pop up 100% of the time, given enough time. Your techies know this, and will sensibly plan for it. With sufficiently good techies (and budget) you never suffer the consequences of a bad technical decision, so you don't and won't.
In other words, get good techies, then get the fuck out of the way and let them do their job.
When the bloody thing works one tenth as reliably as the TCP/IP connection on my box, on a home LAN, with only WinXP Home and Pro connected to it, then I'll give them credit for a job well done.
At the moment, with the frequent unreasonably slow transfers and random now-you-see-it-now-you-don't Windows Networking connections to my flatmate's machines (in the next room!), I reserve my right to grouch about it.
I don't know if its the implementation or the design that sucks, but MS are responsible for both of them, and boy do they suck.
It is irreparable harm, but to Microsoft's monopoly and uncontested dominance of the entire PC industry.
Thus, "irreparable harm" is not always a bad thing.
In addition, Microsoft have had a stranglehold on the world's standard PC platform for so long, it's doubtful if they could compete on a level playing field any more - look at ActiveX (the last time they tried to monopolise a new area or medium, in this case rich content on the web). ActiveX has flopped on its arse, in spite of IE's effective monopoly on the browser market, because technologically (and security-wise) it's simply shite.
Vista's another case in point - overblown, over-hyped, stuck in development hell for years, and missing every feature that would make it worth upgrading at launch.
TBH I wouldnt' be surprised if forcing Microsoft to interoperate was the beginning of the end for the company. When forced to play fairly they seem incapable of winning these days...
IIRC, this is all they're being asked to provide - documentation on their protocols, interfaces and APIs.
The confusion between this and the actual "source code" was introduced by MS and their lawyers, because saying "they want to look at our Intellectual Property" sounds a lot more sympathetic than "they want us to give competitors the merest chance of interoperating with our software".
Microsoft wasn't sanctioned for "bundling software with their OS". They were sanctioned for "illegally misusing their existing monopoly to extend it into other areas", a long-established prtoection against monopolies.
.exe file), removing all the hooks and controls they dump all over your Windows systenm (and which other programs then use) is a nightmare of a job, if it's even possible for an end-user.
It so happens they did this by bundling software with their OS, but "how they comitted the crime" != "the crime itself".
For an easier example, being handed money by a bank teller isn't a crime, but if I run in there with a gun, wave it in their faces and demand all the money in the safe, that's certainly not legal.
When you're a monopoly you have an unreasonable amount of power to have invested in any one entity, so additional restrictions apply than apply to organisations with less power. In the same way a couple of hundred years ago we needed specific rules limiting the power of the monarchy in England - normal people weren't told "before you approve a change in the law you need to consult Parliament" (or similar), because normal people can't change the law.
"Incidentally, you CAN remove apps such as Media Player, IE, and even Paint by going to Add or Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components. Mind, I've never met anyone who's bothered, but I've never met anyone who's ditched Quicktime on their Mac either..."
"Even Paint"? Actually, Paint should be one of the easiest things to remove, since it's a trivial, self-contained application. IE and WMP (in contrast) are collections of software components, which are (intentionally) tightly integrated into the Windows shell. While you might be able to easily get rid of the Start menu item (or even a specific
For an empirical demonstration of this, why did it take so long for MS to produce a WMP-free version of windows? Surely if you're right they chould have just disabled the WMP option in the Windows install, total time taken ~ 5 minutes? As it was they spent ages on it, and only released it so close to the deadline everyone thought the fines would start kicking in before they did.
And IE? Microsoft actually claimed it was impossible to remove "IE" from "Windows" during their US antitrust case. Sure, they had a good reason to perjure themselves at the time, but they were taking a fuck of a risk if it's as simple as turning off an install option.
The EU invests much more power in unelected bureaucrats (and much less in elected officials) than the US system. Thus it's far, far easier to corrupt because one only has to buy out a member once, not every four years, and blatantly corrupt individuals are far harder to replace.
However, the EU also has lots of little voices, any one of whom can speak up and block or delay legislation. When the little guys can speak up it's an excellent system (c.f. Poland on software patents), but often deals are done between the largest players (who tend also to be the most corrupt), and the little guys are railroaded into going along with it. Then it's even easier to corrupt than the US system.
The EU also (historically) has a much stronger anti-corporate slant than the US, although it'll be interesting to see how long this lasts now there's a single powerful entity in Europe for corporations to cozy up to.
In short, the structure of the EU is far more corruptable, but the people are starting from a more anti-corporate position. If the people stay strong the EU will be protected against the most rapacious attempts on their rights - however, if the people drop the ball the EU will be in the pocket of coroporations faster than the US.
Basically, in the great race to a facist totalitarian police state we've got better acceleration, but we're starting from further behind.
Incidentally, has anyone seen the The 14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism? Very, very, very scary. Apart (possibly) from point 5 ( "Rampant sexism"), it looks like a shopping list of the current US political system (and point 5 does go on to specify specifics like "adamantly anti-abortion", "homophobic" and "draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country", all of which sound pretty familiar to me...
I've never used Microsoft Student, but from perusing their site it just looks like a lobotomised version of Works, with a kiddy-friendly frontend. It might be great for kids, but it's not news. Is it a new development? No. Does it extend the bounds of human knowledge? No. Is it an interesting project other people can contribute to or get involved with? No. Is it even a charitable effort? No, it costs.
/. for a fundamental aspect of humanity - we find bad news fascinating, and good news only vaguely interesting. Likewise, "Company X breaks law, is convicted, then uses punishment to its advantage" is interesting. "Company X produces a not-bad product" is not. There are sites which publish these kinds of articles - they're called press-release aggregators. Why are you reading slashdot if all you want is uncritical product announcements?
/. crowd's general anti-MS slant, that's what you get when you get a bunch of engineers, hackers and nerds who value things like technological advance, openness, freedom of action, privacy and decentralisation... and a company that does everything it can to hide or lock away its intellectual property, sues reverse-engineerers, slanders (and knowingly lies about) competitors, unnecessarily locks users into their systems, lobotomises and unnecessarily centralises their own products to retain control over their userbase, has been known to invade their users' privacy, and has abused their illegal monopoly position to actively retarded technological advancement in computing when it's to the benefit of their bottom line.
/. users, but users != editors. The editors are reporting the stories, even if the users don't necessarily like MS as a result. Why don't slashdot users like MS? For all the reasons listed at the beginning of my post.
It may indeed be a "nice" application, but this is hardly news. "Man bites dog" is news - "man pats dog on head and gives him a bone" isn't. It's hardly fair to blame
As for the
It's also important to note that Slashdot does report when Microsoft does something good - I've read stories abot the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's charitable donations, and several other (more Microsoft-related) stories.
True, even in the comments sections of these stories there's often a lot of carping from
The thing is, they only do charitable things where it doesn't affect their profit one cent, and for every one small thing they do that's charitable or good, they're caught doing ten or twenty things that shit all over developers, competitors, the law or their own users.
The disparity between the numbers of "good" and "bad" Microsoft stories is more a reflection of their actions than necessarily of bias in the Slashdot editors.
We hear a lot more stories about Microsoft shitting on people, because they spend a lot more of their time shitting on people, simple as that.
Not necessarily.
True, the web provide a much more fertile ground for rumours, gossip and flash-mobs of all kinds, but this is only a side-effect - the internet it primarily good for propagating memes.
All memes are spread more easily via the web than ever before, which does mean we get more rumours and gossip-presented-as-fact (bad). However, it also means we get more news, grass-roots activism, whistle-blowers and whack-a-mole style propagation of information certain entities (corporations, governments, etc) would rather keep under wraps (very, very, very good).
The problem is many people are still too credulous and inexperienced with this sudden explosion of information they encounter, and haven't developed defence mechanisms yet. This can be easily demonstrated when people first get access - initially they're clueless, naive and obey anything that looks like an instruction ("Click here to stop spyware! Warning: New Virus melts your hard-drive and explodes your toes - forward to everyone you know! Stop $$$pam fast!"). After a few weeks (or family-members beating them about the head and neck) they learn to be more discriminating - they don't forward hoax virus alerts, don't buy stuff from spam, and don't click on irritating advert images that look like Windows dialog boxes.
In the same way "bad" mechanisms have developed to take advantage of this new meme-carrying capacity (spammers, virus hoaxes, etc), we're also starting to see society-level defences and counter-memes against them evolving too - snopes.com, spam/popup filters, the idea you should never buy anything from spam, etc.
The population's information-landscape has changed beyond recognition in (for most of them) less than decade, and it's taking time for them to catch up, that's all.
Of course, along with this incredible boon of information and opportunity there's the concomitant risk - people only reading things which confirm their existing opinions and prejudices. This ultimately leads to groups with different perceptions of reality - "Iraq is nearly over and Bush is the saviour of the US" vs "Bush has fucked the country and Iraq is worse than Vietnam", for example. Communication becomes very difficult between both groups since there's a smaller and smaller amount of common understanding between them, and without some shared values to start from agreement on anything is highly unlikely.
We're starting to see the effects of this with the ongoing culture war (don't flame me, I didn't coin the term) in the US - it's all too easy for people to only read left-wing blogs, or to watch Fox news and believe everything, simply because it makes them feel better than being exposed to other, outside viewpoints.
However, this is a choice for the individual - do you seek out and test alternative viewpoints, thereby testing your own, or do you only stick with sources that agree with you, sinking into intellectual masturbation?
The technology's just there - it's up to us how we use it.
Yeah... nostalgia's just not what it used to be, is it?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Can I come and work for you? <:-)
By bosses think HTML is an alternative for Photoshop (for advertising material/graphic design), or for Visual Basic (for user-interfaces). They just can't seem to get their heads around the idea that you produce the content, and let the user-agent decide how best to display it - as far as they're concerned, they'd rather shut out a significant proportion of their userbase, simply to allow them to specify designs down to the pixel.
And I'm not joking about the Visual Basic (multi-million pound company, and half of our products are written in VB <:-) - they want pixel-perfect positioning (which is no joke when designing to standards and supporting IE). The entire company seems to view X/HTML/CSS's variability as a source of annoyance, rather than its single most important feature.
Just last week I had to take a carefully-designed flow-layout page and recode the CSS to make it fixed-width, absolute positioning, at 1024x768 pixels wide.
Why? Because the Director of Customer Support has a large monitor, and didn't like the fact re-flowed (to keep everything on the screen!) when people browsed in smaller windows. When I pointed out that, although the page wouldn't re-flow for anyone running at a resolution under 1024x768 (>25% of our userbase), it would mean they have to sideways-scroll every time they reached theend of a line. His answer: "Yeah, well, frankly we don't care about selling to anyone running smaller resolutions than mine". Odd, I thought we wanted to sell to anyone who'd buy... but I guess that's why he's the Director and I'm the guy on probably a third of what he's earning...
And why was the Director of Customer Support involved in a marketing website decision? It's just that sort of company.
To sum up Gabe's Statements
Vista (unbelievably) might not be much good. (Shock, horror!)
XBox 360, by not necessarily having a hard drive, makes console development, which traditionally can't depend on having hard drive, harder. That makes sense.
Sony's fundamentally different chip design requires different programming techniques, and might be harder to port. Waaaah!
However, this fundamentally different chip design isn't designed to speed up processing, distribute tasks more effectively or demonstrate an important and new approach to general-purpose computing... no, it's solely to ensure vendor lock-in to Sony. No, really.
Steam solves all these problems (next-gen games being hard to develop, consoles lacking hard drives, different chip designs needing new skills, and Sony evilly locking us in to their own architecture), without in any way having anything to do with any of them. Steam good. Buy Steam. Buy it now.
I'm not saying he doesn't have the odd point, but does anyone else find Gabe Newell's pronouncements more and more whiny? Far from the industry god that brought us HL, now he's verging on sounding pathetic. Oooh, help, help, next-gen development is hard... radically different processor architectures require different programming techniques... oooh... lacking non-standard console peripherals makes console programming hard... oooh.
Gabe? We know. Sit down. It isn't going to change because you're whining about it in every interview you give.
And the last paragraph really was the limit - suggesting Steam (a new distribution system) would really have any fucking efect on the actual problems he'd raised? It's a billing and download service, not a fucking hard-drive, and not a middleware layer for the PS3. What were they smoking in the interview, and WTF does a bloody Steam advert have to do with the actual issues they talked about?
I'd say Gabe should come back to developing PC games, but frankly if a missing-or-not hard drive is twisting his nuts these days, god only knows what he'd think trying to develop for the heterogenous PC platform again...
On the other hand, maybe the perception that this is a new situation might help change Bush's retarded climate-change policies (basically, "putting our hands over our ears and chanting 'Lalalalalalalala-I-can't-hear-you-lalalalalaaaaa' ").
It's easy to ignore "climate change leads to less predictable, more extreme weather" when it's just hordes of little brown asian people who're getting their houseboats smashed to shit.
It's a little harder to pretend climate-change is rubbish when it's thousands of voting, tax-paying, cared-about, primarily black-African-Americans on the sharp end of it, right?
No, wait...
Indeed. I always preferred the seventh definition offered in the jargon file:
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
since this seems to me to be the closest to the spirit of hacking. Hell, I know some talented hardware hackers that would rule out any definition restricting "hacking" to software (as many definitions do). In fact, I know plenty of people with the hacker nature who've never touched a computer.
Likewise, the best definition for "a hack" I ever saw was roughly:
Hack: The appropriate application of ingenuity
Likewise, hacking would then become "appropriately applying ingenuity", and a hacker would be "one who applies ingenuity appropriately".