While I agree with you, this is unfortunately not the way the world works. It was more profitable to insist that everyone needs computers and that they are easy to use and require no training or knowledge and would just work.
So now we've got a few people who can't and never would be able to manage that who have computers and use them daily. Then we have a bunch more people who could manage that, except marketing (and even some IT pros that seem to give advice based on what would be ideal rather than what actually is) has told them that it just works and they don't need to have a clue what's actually happening or how to do anything because it will all just happen for them. So now, even though they could learn how it works and how to do things, they don't and are convinced they shouldn't have to and get upset when something doesn't just work, trouble and risk free.
The best solution, of course, would be to get it through to people that computers are actually not simple and are very complex and require some level of understanding and research to use effectively and safely. That's a lot easier said than done, though, since no one wants to hear our opinion on the situation. The ones that do want to hear it likely don't need us to tell them.
Pretty close here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Link
They showed it on Nick at Nite when I was a kid. I haven't seen it in somewhere around 20 years, so I can't tell you if it's actually any good (for what it is, obviously it's going to be pretty bad overall).
I agree. I think we really need to be keeping a close eye on Google. There have been several instances of Google slipping things that clearly did not follow their "Do No Evil" motto into the TOS of their apps, collecting more data than necessary, etc. People complain and then Google claims it was a mistake and undoes it if possible. This sure happens a whole lot, imo. It seems equally likely to me that they are not mistakes, they are seeing how far they can push things without outrage or, even worse, trying to sneak this stuff by and hoping no one notices to be outraged.
When talking about just 1, maybe 2 things connecting to your tv or receiver composite video plus audio wasn't a big deal, once you had several it gets messy. With component video it gets even messier. Granted, they weren't difficult to work with, just ugly and messy.
You'd be surprised. While I don't run any websites with ads, I have a couple free mobile apps with ads. These are apps targeted at technical people... sys admins, web developers, etc. Even on these I see clicks daily. Most are probably just people being nice and clicking to help support me rather than people with any intention of signing up for the offer, of course
Definitely. That would have been awesome. Even on screen multiplayer would have been a lot of fun. I play it on xbox 360, so it would have been great to be able to hand my wife the other controller to take over someone in my party or create her own character to be in my party.
I agree, what you're saying definitely plays into it for me. I spend all day at work in real life dealing with a mix of people, both good and bad, and fair and unfair challenges. When I play a video game I play it to escape the real world.
I want a world where if a challenge is completely unfair bs, I don't do it. If I'm a good person and/or do a good job, I'm fairly rewarded for it. If I fail I can start over, use a cheat if I feel like it without affecting others negatively, grind out a few levels, or just go play something else and I can come back and pick up where I left off whenever I feel like it. It's also usually my own fault when I fail, with the exception of the occasional cheap fight or buggy game. There's no CEO expecting me to do 5 men's work or marketing guys demanding the system do something it was never intended to do because that's what they want to sell. Either I can do it or I can't and if I can't, there's almost always something in my control to make it possible if I feel like it.
As shocking as this might be, some people enjoy and value different things than others. You might find every single player game boring the second time through. I, on the other hand, do not depending on the game.
I can play as a different class, be evil instead of good, make different choices where those choices open up different paths in the game, go back through to see stuff I missed the first time because I was playing without a faq, and so on. Sure, it's usually not as good as the first time, but "not as good" doesn't mean "bad"
I don't think it's really all that different from comparing Windows market share to Mac OS or even just OS X (to keep things slightly simpler and more relevant) market share. Windows is an OS which runs on hardware sold by lots of manufacturers and there are numerous versions of it in use at any point in time. OS X is software developed by Apple to run on hardware sold by Apple. There are still a few versions of it in use at any point in time.
There's really nothing here that should be confusing to anyone who's job it is to provide these sorts of statistics. It sounds more to me like Yankee Group is being shady and wording the statements regarding Android in as confusing and negative a manner as they can. In the previous post about this report someone went into some detail about Yankee Group's history of doing this sort of thing. I'm too lazy to go find it, though.
I'm in the same boat. Online multiplayer against strangers is fun for the first month or two a game is out for me. After that, most of the regular people and average skilled gamers have left and all you've got are people that are some combination of so much better than me (and better than I have the time and patience or natural talent to be) that I might as well just set the controller down and let them kill me and assholes. If all it has going for it is multiplayer, I'll probably stop there and not buy any expansions or sequels.
Good single player game? I'll buy it, I'll probably buy most of the expansions that get released, and I'll buy the sequels. That's held true to Fable (I also re-bought the whole game just for the lost chapters version), Fable 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Oblivion, Rock Band, and so on with a continually growing list of games that include, and are frequently solely based on, a solid single player experience
So many games today are released in awful states since developers figure they can just patch the worst problems. And if they fix problems that's all they tend to work on, the very worst of the worst problems. They seldom go back and take time to fix all the little details that they got wrong yet which would show that they care enough to set them right.
Honestly, as a developer myself (although not in the games industry) it's more likely that the developers DO want to fix those bugs. It's the upper managers and marketing assholes that demand it be released now because they want to see money right now while making promises to the devs of allowing time to go back and fix the bugs with no intention of following through on that.
I have yet to meet a developer who enjoys releasing half assed buggy code (even the stupid, incompetent ones I've met were usually releasing what they thought was good code and wanted it to be good). From a personal standpoint, it's no good for our egos. We can't show off how awesome our code is when it's terrible. From a business standpoint it sucks because when people eventually start complaining the blame gets put on the developer, and in the worst case scenarios, a new half assed patch to the problem has to be rushed while you're already busy and overworked from whatever new project the company has come up with that they want you to complete in half the reasonable time with 1/4 the amount of staff needed.
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. I seem to be reading more into people's posts than they are trying to say lately.
It was really just I say "bah" to your fancy text and web-enabled phones, mine actually works as a *phone*:-)
Which made me go "So does my smart phone." But hey, like I also replied to the last person I did this to recently, it's text, it gets misunderstood. You can't reasonably think of and clarify every possible way someone might misunderstand you in this medium.
I should also mention, I just assumed young, not an idiot. Back in the day I thought businesses were successful due to good leadership guiding the current hard workers and the hard work of those leaders when they were building the company up from the ground rather than the combination of ruthless backstabbing and sheer dumb luck resulting in success in spite of bad decision after bad decision that all too frequently seems to be the case.
I see this sort of argument quite a bit on here. I don't get it. It's great that your ancient phone works well for you and does exactly what you need. I don't see how that makes owning a smart phone a bad choice for other people or why you think that smart phones don't work well.
I've got a g1 on t-mobile, I use it nearly daily as a phone and have never dropped a call. It works great as a phone. It also makes a rather handy little computer for quick look ups on the web, is great for sending a text when I need to get info to someone but don't care to actually talk to them, and provides a lot of cool services and functionality through the apps designed for it that go beyond what is generally reasonable for a mobile web app.
Yep, I did misunderstand you then. I took your OP as "that's not how business works" rather than your intended "that's not how you should want your business to work".
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
In many companies that IS important. I've worked a few places where it was far more important to appear successful than it is to actually be successful.
The most relevant example I can think of is way back in my phone support days. We had a ton of metrics - Average calls/day, Average calls/hr, first call resolution rate, % time spent on hold between calls, etc. That last one almost got me fired. I averaged about 70 calls/day with a 5-6 minute average call length and something like 70% first call resolution (this was before every call center had remote control capabilities, so it was support based purely on what the user was describing, and that was really high).
The call center average was something like 45 calls/day and a 10-12 minute per call average. While I was spending the same amount of time per call on hold in between calls finishing up filling out the tickets, the same amount of time per call multiplied by more calls = higher percentage of time on hold.
Some people in management didn't quite get the math and overall picture and wanted me fired. I wasn't meeting all of the metrics that were set and that's what mattered. Fortunately others managers did get it and fought to keep me employed while warning of me the numbers game and working with me to present the numbers that people wanted to see.
Funny, I don't remember ever chanting "Drill baby, drill", this is the first time I've even typed it, and there are no SUVs in my driveway, either. I've got one vehicle that is somewhat of a gas guzzler that sees under 5k miles/yr driving which I own and am rather annoyed that the local gas stations have not made e85 available for which would reduce my oil based fuel consumption while letting me make more power (Of course the corn/ethanol based fuel long term viability is a whole other discussion).
Even for the people who want(ed) more drilling, most of them still were not chanting "Drill baby, drill without proper safeguards in place even if it means risking a huge chunk of our coastline!" afaik. I'm sure it's safe to assume most people who were in the "drill baby, drill" group still wanted it done as safely and correctly as possible.
Ah hah! Thank you! Every couple of months I find myself trying to remember which search engine used to offer the proper, complex boolean search functionality. Occasionally I even make the rounds through all of the old search engines (the ones that haven't just become aggregators of other search engines, anyway) and give it a try in case I can stumble upon it. I guess I'm out of luck on that.
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While I agree with you, this is unfortunately not the way the world works. It was more profitable to insist that everyone needs computers and that they are easy to use and require no training or knowledge and would just work.
So now we've got a few people who can't and never would be able to manage that who have computers and use them daily. Then we have a bunch more people who could manage that, except marketing (and even some IT pros that seem to give advice based on what would be ideal rather than what actually is) has told them that it just works and they don't need to have a clue what's actually happening or how to do anything because it will all just happen for them. So now, even though they could learn how it works and how to do things, they don't and are convinced they shouldn't have to and get upset when something doesn't just work, trouble and risk free.
The best solution, of course, would be to get it through to people that computers are actually not simple and are very complex and require some level of understanding and research to use effectively and safely. That's a lot easier said than done, though, since no one wants to hear our opinion on the situation. The ones that do want to hear it likely don't need us to tell them.
Pretty close here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_Link They showed it on Nick at Nite when I was a kid. I haven't seen it in somewhere around 20 years, so I can't tell you if it's actually any good (for what it is, obviously it's going to be pretty bad overall).
That's awesome, thanks man! A childhood mystery has been solved.
Interesting. I always wondered where the idspispopd code came from since it was so much longer than the others.
I agree. I think we really need to be keeping a close eye on Google. There have been several instances of Google slipping things that clearly did not follow their "Do No Evil" motto into the TOS of their apps, collecting more data than necessary, etc. People complain and then Google claims it was a mistake and undoes it if possible. This sure happens a whole lot, imo. It seems equally likely to me that they are not mistakes, they are seeing how far they can push things without outrage or, even worse, trying to sneak this stuff by and hoping no one notices to be outraged.
When talking about just 1, maybe 2 things connecting to your tv or receiver composite video plus audio wasn't a big deal, once you had several it gets messy. With component video it gets even messier. Granted, they weren't difficult to work with, just ugly and messy.
You'd be surprised. While I don't run any websites with ads, I have a couple free mobile apps with ads. These are apps targeted at technical people... sys admins, web developers, etc. Even on these I see clicks daily. Most are probably just people being nice and clicking to help support me rather than people with any intention of signing up for the offer, of course
Definitely. That would have been awesome. Even on screen multiplayer would have been a lot of fun. I play it on xbox 360, so it would have been great to be able to hand my wife the other controller to take over someone in my party or create her own character to be in my party.
I agree, what you're saying definitely plays into it for me. I spend all day at work in real life dealing with a mix of people, both good and bad, and fair and unfair challenges. When I play a video game I play it to escape the real world.
I want a world where if a challenge is completely unfair bs, I don't do it. If I'm a good person and/or do a good job, I'm fairly rewarded for it. If I fail I can start over, use a cheat if I feel like it without affecting others negatively, grind out a few levels, or just go play something else and I can come back and pick up where I left off whenever I feel like it. It's also usually my own fault when I fail, with the exception of the occasional cheap fight or buggy game. There's no CEO expecting me to do 5 men's work or marketing guys demanding the system do something it was never intended to do because that's what they want to sell. Either I can do it or I can't and if I can't, there's almost always something in my control to make it possible if I feel like it.
As shocking as this might be, some people enjoy and value different things than others. You might find every single player game boring the second time through. I, on the other hand, do not depending on the game.
I can play as a different class, be evil instead of good, make different choices where those choices open up different paths in the game, go back through to see stuff I missed the first time because I was playing without a faq, and so on. Sure, it's usually not as good as the first time, but "not as good" doesn't mean "bad"
Nope, they aren't all Taco Bell until sometime around 2032, probably 5-10 years before that, really.
I don't think it's really all that different from comparing Windows market share to Mac OS or even just OS X (to keep things slightly simpler and more relevant) market share. Windows is an OS which runs on hardware sold by lots of manufacturers and there are numerous versions of it in use at any point in time. OS X is software developed by Apple to run on hardware sold by Apple. There are still a few versions of it in use at any point in time.
There's really nothing here that should be confusing to anyone who's job it is to provide these sorts of statistics. It sounds more to me like Yankee Group is being shady and wording the statements regarding Android in as confusing and negative a manner as they can. In the previous post about this report someone went into some detail about Yankee Group's history of doing this sort of thing. I'm too lazy to go find it, though.
I'm in the same boat. Online multiplayer against strangers is fun for the first month or two a game is out for me. After that, most of the regular people and average skilled gamers have left and all you've got are people that are some combination of so much better than me (and better than I have the time and patience or natural talent to be) that I might as well just set the controller down and let them kill me and assholes. If all it has going for it is multiplayer, I'll probably stop there and not buy any expansions or sequels.
Good single player game? I'll buy it, I'll probably buy most of the expansions that get released, and I'll buy the sequels. That's held true to Fable (I also re-bought the whole game just for the lost chapters version), Fable 2, Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Oblivion, Rock Band, and so on with a continually growing list of games that include, and are frequently solely based on, a solid single player experience
So many games today are released in awful states since developers figure they can just patch the worst problems. And if they fix problems that's all they tend to work on, the very worst of the worst problems. They seldom go back and take time to fix all the little details that they got wrong yet which would show that they care enough to set them right.
Honestly, as a developer myself (although not in the games industry) it's more likely that the developers DO want to fix those bugs. It's the upper managers and marketing assholes that demand it be released now because they want to see money right now while making promises to the devs of allowing time to go back and fix the bugs with no intention of following through on that.
I have yet to meet a developer who enjoys releasing half assed buggy code (even the stupid, incompetent ones I've met were usually releasing what they thought was good code and wanted it to be good). From a personal standpoint, it's no good for our egos. We can't show off how awesome our code is when it's terrible. From a business standpoint it sucks because when people eventually start complaining the blame gets put on the developer, and in the worst case scenarios, a new half assed patch to the problem has to be rushed while you're already busy and overworked from whatever new project the company has come up with that they want you to complete in half the reasonable time with 1/4 the amount of staff needed.
and I screwed up my quoteblock. bleh.
Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. I seem to be reading more into people's posts than they are trying to say lately.
It was really just I say "bah" to your fancy text and web-enabled phones, mine actually works as a *phone* :-)
Which made me go "So does my smart phone." But hey, like I also replied to the last person I did this to recently, it's text, it gets misunderstood. You can't reasonably think of and clarify every possible way someone might misunderstand you in this medium.
I should also mention, I just assumed young, not an idiot. Back in the day I thought businesses were successful due to good leadership guiding the current hard workers and the hard work of those leaders when they were building the company up from the ground rather than the combination of ruthless backstabbing and sheer dumb luck resulting in success in spite of bad decision after bad decision that all too frequently seems to be the case.
Eh, it's a text based communication. Misunderstandings happen all the time.
I see this sort of argument quite a bit on here. I don't get it. It's great that your ancient phone works well for you and does exactly what you need. I don't see how that makes owning a smart phone a bad choice for other people or why you think that smart phones don't work well.
I've got a g1 on t-mobile, I use it nearly daily as a phone and have never dropped a call. It works great as a phone. It also makes a rather handy little computer for quick look ups on the web, is great for sending a text when I need to get info to someone but don't care to actually talk to them, and provides a lot of cool services and functionality through the apps designed for it that go beyond what is generally reasonable for a mobile web app.
Yep, I did misunderstand you then. I took your OP as "that's not how business works" rather than your intended "that's not how you should want your business to work".
However, that part about them being heavily concerned about gaming performance gauges concerns me... when people are gaming the measurements, you're not getting a true representation of the criteria that you really care about...
In many companies that IS important. I've worked a few places where it was far more important to appear successful than it is to actually be successful.
The most relevant example I can think of is way back in my phone support days. We had a ton of metrics - Average calls/day, Average calls/hr, first call resolution rate, % time spent on hold between calls, etc. That last one almost got me fired. I averaged about 70 calls/day with a 5-6 minute average call length and something like 70% first call resolution (this was before every call center had remote control capabilities, so it was support based purely on what the user was describing, and that was really high).
The call center average was something like 45 calls/day and a 10-12 minute per call average. While I was spending the same amount of time per call on hold in between calls finishing up filling out the tickets, the same amount of time per call multiplied by more calls = higher percentage of time on hold.
Some people in management didn't quite get the math and overall picture and wanted me fired. I wasn't meeting all of the metrics that were set and that's what mattered. Fortunately others managers did get it and fought to keep me employed while warning of me the numbers game and working with me to present the numbers that people wanted to see.
Funny, I don't remember ever chanting "Drill baby, drill", this is the first time I've even typed it, and there are no SUVs in my driveway, either. I've got one vehicle that is somewhat of a gas guzzler that sees under 5k miles/yr driving which I own and am rather annoyed that the local gas stations have not made e85 available for which would reduce my oil based fuel consumption while letting me make more power (Of course the corn/ethanol based fuel long term viability is a whole other discussion). Even for the people who want(ed) more drilling, most of them still were not chanting "Drill baby, drill without proper safeguards in place even if it means risking a huge chunk of our coastline!" afaik. I'm sure it's safe to assume most people who were in the "drill baby, drill" group still wanted it done as safely and correctly as possible.
Ah hah! Thank you! Every couple of months I find myself trying to remember which search engine used to offer the proper, complex boolean search functionality. Occasionally I even make the rounds through all of the old search engines (the ones that haven't just become aggregators of other search engines, anyway) and give it a try in case I can stumble upon it. I guess I'm out of luck on that.
Wish I could mod this up even more. I came in here to bitch about the same thing. Fucking ridiculous shit.
Ah, ok. Thanks for the info.