What if Microsoft, or Apple, came out with a public statement that "FOSS products have extremely poor usability, because their developers refuse to accept usability input." It would be hard to defend against such an accusation, since we have almost no cases of devs accepting input from non-devs.
This would cause a huge uproar, I'm willing to bet.
Pardon? You expect Microsoft to help FOSS indirectly by educating their competition about their weak spots?:) Somehow I don't see that happening.
Actually in my opinion, usability is actually one of the greatest advantages of the non-FOSS software. And FOSS often doesn't have it for one simple reason: good UX designers are PRETTY DAMN EXPENSIVE, because there are just too few of these, much fewer than the IT industry requires.
So as soon as people start to realize that Immediately Obvious piece of software is better than a more feature-complete one, there will be increased demand on UX designers and so there will eventually be more UX designers. The process has already started, albeit slow, but for now we still get to hear the ubiquitous King of Arguments 'I like the interface, and who doesn't should go RTFM' quite often.
Agreed, it doesn't follow from WoW example alone - this was a non-sequitur on my part. But the MMOG industry is more or less clear on where the money is, so for me it's like 'they did it right, and were deservedly rewarded for that'. Not very convincing, I know:)
I can't agree with this statement. I can agree that WoW *encourages* grinding, it does, but as for "must", it's an exaggeration. (In my book, grinding is any repetitious behavior that does not grant you a satisfying experience in itself, but the rewards for which are.)
You can get to level 70 just by doing quests and an occasional instance run for a change. By that time you will normally be able to join a guild that can get you to all non-heroic 5-man top world content (assuming you have at least some basic social skills, lacking which you won't be advancing far either way, grinding or not). And once you are good at these 5-mans, you're qualified for Karazhan.
Many of these folks complaining about the grinding fail to see one simple thing: not everyone plays the game like they do. Not everyone is obsessed about their power level and the quality of their items - many people are just happy to play along. They however are often not very vocal, and Slashdot has an IT crowd so it's no surprise that many readers assume all players think in the same terms and have the same values as they do. There's a truly insightful article about it at:
Online chess servers are all flawed because there are chess computers that can beat anyone. FPS shooters are all flawed because of aiming bots. Really, making a game where aiming is required to become better. How stupid. They should design their games better.
They should strive to, yes. I never said they have to make it so that advantages of play automation are negligible - and never meant it either. That's a lot of difference.
If selling the software is tortuous interference, then giving it away is probably so also.
I never argued with this either.
They try to order people to do something which they have no control over nor reliable means to check or prove if these people actually did it. This is what fails my 'idiot test' - not the fact that someone could be held liable for doing it.
Fundamentally impossible, yes, but there are sometimes design decisions that would at least make automated play less beneficial. But yes, I agree that in general this is an uphill battle that doesn't really have a winning strategy for the designers.
What I can't agree with however is the statement that Blizzard should change the game so that 'people are not rewarded for sinking so much time into the game'. Players with time and resolution ('hardcore') are interested in having an advantage over the new guys and those who don't have too much time to play ('casuals'). What you are suggesting basically can be described as making the game less hardcore and more casual, denying the hardcore guys their advantage. In other words, rob Peter to play Paul.
So when we have (roughly speaking) two groups of players who are willing to pay and whose expectations are mutually exclusive, usually money decides who wins. And we already know that high numbers of subscriptions that WoW shows at the very least indicate Blizzard were not far off with their design choices in this regard.
Anyway it is not possible to design a game that would please everyone - you have to make an educated guess whom to target, judging by the resources required to implement either game model and the expected demand from players. So this is not a design *flaw*, it is a design *fork*.
Simply put, if a million people doesn't play because they don't like the grind but two millions play because they do like it, then two millions win. Complaining that you're not targeted here is pointless as long as they're making more money targeting those who actually like the game for what you don't.
You can't be serious. CAPTCHAs are annoying enough on normal websites already. Many people seem to accept that they have to only pass through them once during registration, for the sake of their own good, but asking them every once in a while is surely going to hurt. Losing customers to the inconvenience of protection measures added to retain customers is not exactly the price anyone would be looking to pay.
Admittedly this analogy is going a bit too far, but requiring every user to confirm every time that they are not a bot is akin to having everyone boarding a plane prove that they're not a terrorist. Many libertarian minded IT folks heavily oppose the inevitable privacy breaches that happen in the latter regard, theoretically, for their own protection. Why would these same IT folks advocate using a similar sort of thing online is beyond me:)
From my experience as a MMO designer, battling automated play is actually a huge design problem. In many cases you don't want to do it by changing the code because the time and effort spent to do that are much better spent developing real game features. So in many games people take the easiest route and just outlaw automated gameplay instead of changing the design to make sure it is not possible to benefit much from it. Can't really blame anyone for that.
Still it doesn't change this Blizzard's request being utterly ridiculous. With all my genuine respect to the company, someone must have had a brainfart in this case.
That's what they will have to do if they want at least a chance at surviving - provide a public gateway.
And the libertarian geekdom is actually not interested in this project to survive, because if it does, the governments will eventually push us there, where they will have all those things like internet user IDs and other funny stuff that the only the privacy concerned have bad dreams about today...
It however is a problem, somewhat of a different kind. If you want to collect some stats, you're interested in as representative a subset as possible. The fact that someone has to explicitly express their content to be taken into account means there's a bias being introduced, since these people are not exactly representative of the whole field.
With surveys (as opposed to automatic data collection) it becomes even worse since people tend to say what they believe they are/do or want to rather than truth. To use an example someone gave in the thread, if they believe 5-10 minutes of their are worth more than $10, they will be filtered from this survey. There are ways to combat this, such as taking distribution across gender/age/whatever categories, but it's still subjective - and in this regard data collected automatically is objective and therefore worth much more.
It is worse than that. MS is saying "replace your board of directors with a board especially appointed to sell the company to us".
Since that (being sold to MS) is the best thing that Yahoo can do, there's really not much difference whether the new board is 'especially appointed to sell' or not. Whatever board there is, they *have* to sell - at least if they respect the approach that they have to act in shareholders' interests.
Re:Interesting press coverage of this.
on
Water Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 1
I've noticed that almost all of the news headlines covering this are qualified statements like "Lander finds water on Mars, according to scientists". As if they're afraid to actually say something straightforward like "Water found on Mars" I think the reason is that the scientists technically have no proof it is actually water - what they have instead is a substance that looks like water, behaves like water and quacks like water. Whether it makes said something water, you be the judge.
On the other account, I totally agree - the media don't always seem so scrupulous in other areas:)
Well the profits in the IT industry may be too low so they have to struggle. Off the top of my head:
1. The IT company owners are too greedy 2. The revenues in IT are too low 3. The costs of running an IT company are too high (taxes, infrastructure...) 4. The country may have no problem hiring techies, but there's a lack of qualified producers/project managers 5. (I'm sure there's something else...)
Sometimes you just can't make good profit in an industry, no matter what. Merely stating no one offers enough compensation does not mean this is the root cause.
Many privacy issues are solved by properly educating users what to do and what not to do online, while many security issues are solved by producing more secure software and educating people to use said more secure software. It is much easier to educate people to use e.g. Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express, than it is to explain all kinds of threats that there are on teh internets and how to evade them.
of course different people will have a different idea what is obvious and what is not, but there are degrees. sorry to be somewhat harsh but if someone looks at a simple 'for' loop and needs explanation what it does, these people should be the least of the code author's concerns. you said you have not completed your education as programmer, so maybe the above comment would be useful to you - but once you have graduated, you will recognize it being redundant. I'm fairly tolerant with regards to coding and commenting styles, but this particular example is clearly extreme - such comments only create clutter.
one good example of redundant commenting - and a bad code in one - is at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/wtflibphp.aspx. if you're interested, CodeSOD section of that site has more examples of redundant and overcomplicated code.
it primarily depends upon the recipients who don't know any better than to use all sorts of unsafe mail clients who allow such tricks to be played on them. as long as these comprise the majority, that business model is sustainable.
so this is not a privacy issue but a security issue.. and it's much older than 2000.
I lost my cookies several times (in combination with my laptop running out of power). Oh, you should really watch what you eat. If you do, not even your laptop running out of power will make you lose your cookies.
this should be compared on even footing in terms of $ per watt of generation capability I think that if this energy source is compared on even footing with other ones, it wins hands, err, feet down.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, yeah, not everyone is a geek. But there's value in learning to interact with people who aren't exactly like you are.
Value, sure. Fun, no way.
What if Microsoft, or Apple, came out with a public statement that "FOSS products have extremely poor usability, because their developers refuse to accept usability input." It would be hard to defend against such an accusation, since we have almost no cases of devs accepting input from non-devs.
This would cause a huge uproar, I'm willing to bet.
Pardon? You expect Microsoft to help FOSS indirectly by educating their competition about their weak spots? :) Somehow I don't see that happening.
Actually in my opinion, usability is actually one of the greatest advantages of the non-FOSS software. And FOSS often doesn't have it for one simple reason: good UX designers are PRETTY DAMN EXPENSIVE, because there are just too few of these, much fewer than the IT industry requires.
So as soon as people start to realize that Immediately Obvious piece of software is better than a more feature-complete one, there will be increased demand on UX designers and so there will eventually be more UX designers. The process has already started, albeit slow, but for now we still get to hear the ubiquitous King of Arguments 'I like the interface, and who doesn't should go RTFM' quite often.
(1) "Usability" is in the mind of the user.
(2) "Designers" who can't code have absolutely no business "working" in software.
And this mentality is exactly the reason the free software usability is poor.
Now, as to how to fix *that*, I've no clue.
Agreed, it doesn't follow from WoW example alone - this was a non-sequitur on my part. But the MMOG industry is more or less clear on where the money is, so for me it's like 'they did it right, and were deservedly rewarded for that'. Not very convincing, I know :)
In WoW you *must* grind.
I can't agree with this statement. I can agree that WoW *encourages* grinding, it does, but as for "must", it's an exaggeration. (In my book, grinding is any repetitious behavior that does not grant you a satisfying experience in itself, but the rewards for which are.)
You can get to level 70 just by doing quests and an occasional instance run for a change. By that time you will normally be able to join a guild that can get you to all non-heroic 5-man top world content (assuming you have at least some basic social skills, lacking which you won't be advancing far either way, grinding or not). And once you are good at these 5-mans, you're qualified for Karazhan.
Many of these folks complaining about the grinding fail to see one simple thing: not everyone plays the game like they do. Not everyone is obsessed about their power level and the quality of their items - many people are just happy to play along. They however are often not very vocal, and Slashdot has an IT crowd so it's no surprise that many readers assume all players think in the same terms and have the same values as they do. There's a truly insightful article about it at:
http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm
And as this has gone pretty far off topic here already, I'd like to stop here.
Online chess servers are all flawed because there are chess computers that can beat anyone. FPS shooters are all flawed because of aiming bots. Really, making a game where aiming is required to become better. How stupid. They should design their games better.
They should strive to, yes. I never said they have to make it so that advantages of play automation are negligible - and never meant it either. That's a lot of difference.
If selling the software is tortuous interference, then giving it away is probably so also.
I never argued with this either.
They try to order people to do something which they have no control over nor reliable means to check or prove if these people actually did it. This is what fails my 'idiot test' - not the fact that someone could be held liable for doing it.
Fundamentally impossible, yes, but there are sometimes design decisions that would at least make automated play less beneficial. But yes, I agree that in general this is an uphill battle that doesn't really have a winning strategy for the designers.
What I can't agree with however is the statement that Blizzard should change the game so that 'people are not rewarded for sinking so much time into the game'. Players with time and resolution ('hardcore') are interested in having an advantage over the new guys and those who don't have too much time to play ('casuals'). What you are suggesting basically can be described as making the game less hardcore and more casual, denying the hardcore guys their advantage. In other words, rob Peter to play Paul.
So when we have (roughly speaking) two groups of players who are willing to pay and whose expectations are mutually exclusive, usually money decides who wins. And we already know that high numbers of subscriptions that WoW shows at the very least indicate Blizzard were not far off with their design choices in this regard.
Anyway it is not possible to design a game that would please everyone - you have to make an educated guess whom to target, judging by the resources required to implement either game model and the expected demand from players. So this is not a design *flaw*, it is a design *fork*.
Simply put, if a million people doesn't play because they don't like the grind but two millions play because they do like it, then two millions win. Complaining that you're not targeted here is pointless as long as they're making more money targeting those who actually like the game for what you don't.
You can't be serious. CAPTCHAs are annoying enough on normal websites already. Many people seem to accept that they have to only pass through them once during registration, for the sake of their own good, but asking them every once in a while is surely going to hurt. Losing customers to the inconvenience of protection measures added to retain customers is not exactly the price anyone would be looking to pay.
Admittedly this analogy is going a bit too far, but requiring every user to confirm every time that they are not a bot is akin to having everyone boarding a plane prove that they're not a terrorist. Many libertarian minded IT folks heavily oppose the inevitable privacy breaches that happen in the latter regard, theoretically, for their own protection. Why would these same IT folks advocate using a similar sort of thing online is beyond me :)
It's not a *fix*, it's a design flaw.
From my experience as a MMO designer, battling automated play is actually a huge design problem. In many cases you don't want to do it by changing the code because the time and effort spent to do that are much better spent developing real game features. So in many games people take the easiest route and just outlaw automated gameplay instead of changing the design to make sure it is not possible to benefit much from it. Can't really blame anyone for that.
Still it doesn't change this Blizzard's request being utterly ridiculous. With all my genuine respect to the company, someone must have had a brainfart in this case.
That's what they will have to do if they want at least a chance at surviving - provide a public gateway.
And the libertarian geekdom is actually not interested in this project to survive, because if it does, the governments will eventually push us there, where they will have all those things like internet user IDs and other funny stuff that the only the privacy concerned have bad dreams about today...
I miss Pluto.
Don't worry, if you keep training, your aim will eventually improve.
It however is a problem, somewhat of a different kind. If you want to collect some stats, you're interested in as representative a subset as possible. The fact that someone has to explicitly express their content to be taken into account means there's a bias being introduced, since these people are not exactly representative of the whole field.
With surveys (as opposed to automatic data collection) it becomes even worse since people tend to say what they believe they are/do or want to rather than truth. To use an example someone gave in the thread, if they believe 5-10 minutes of their are worth more than $10, they will be filtered from this survey. There are ways to combat this, such as taking distribution across gender/age/whatever categories, but it's still subjective - and in this regard data collected automatically is objective and therefore worth much more.
It is worse than that. MS is saying "replace your board of directors with a board especially appointed to sell the company to us".
Since that (being sold to MS) is the best thing that Yahoo can do, there's really not much difference whether the new board is 'especially appointed to sell' or not. Whatever board there is, they *have* to sell - at least if they respect the approach that they have to act in shareholders' interests.
On the other account, I totally agree - the media don't always seem so scrupulous in other areas :)
Well the profits in the IT industry may be too low so they have to struggle. Off the top of my head:
1. The IT company owners are too greedy
2. The revenues in IT are too low
3. The costs of running an IT company are too high (taxes, infrastructure...)
4. The country may have no problem hiring techies, but there's a lack of qualified producers/project managers
5. (I'm sure there's something else...)
Sometimes you just can't make good profit in an industry, no matter what. Merely stating no one offers enough compensation does not mean this is the root cause.
Approach to solving the problem.
Many privacy issues are solved by properly educating users what to do and what not to do online, while many security issues are solved by producing more secure software and educating people to use said more secure software. It is much easier to educate people to use e.g. Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express, than it is to explain all kinds of threats that there are on teh internets and how to evade them.
of course different people will have a different idea what is obvious and what is not, but there are degrees. sorry to be somewhat harsh but if someone looks at a simple 'for' loop and needs explanation what it does, these people should be the least of the code author's concerns. you said you have not completed your education as programmer, so maybe the above comment would be useful to you - but once you have graduated, you will recognize it being redundant. I'm fairly tolerant with regards to coding and commenting styles, but this particular example is clearly extreme - such comments only create clutter.
one good example of redundant commenting - and a bad code in one - is at http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/wtflibphp.aspx. if you're interested, CodeSOD section of that site has more examples of redundant and overcomplicated code.
so comparing what appears to be a boolean variable to a constant of 'true' is good coding style now?
given the topic of TFA, this seems to be even more ironic somehow.
it primarily depends upon the recipients who don't know any better than to use all sorts of unsafe mail clients who allow such tricks to be played on them. as long as these comprise the majority, that business model is sustainable.
so this is not a privacy issue but a security issue.. and it's much older than 2000.
Because you still want to be polite and actually consider complying with a requests to shut off your phone?
As long as there is a switch to use/not use this 'manner enforcement', I doubt there is a problem.
I for one am hoping this gets pushed back by the Lords.
How often does this happen that the Lords send a law back to Commons?(No sarcasm intended, I honestly do not know.)
You know what? They all will die one day, well almost. And they are not replaced much by the younger generation.
http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html