Check out the email address of the MS rep: v-sashak@microsoft.com. The 'v-' at the beginning is, IIRC, Microspeak for 'not a Microsoft employee'. It's probably a contractor or agency temp that works events who has been given an MS mail account. Which would explain the less-than-clueful answers (and why (s)he has to speak to his/her manager).
Here's a revelation for you: people are different.
And here's a revelation for you: if you read the post to which I was replying (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it seems likely that you would agree with me that (s)he was wrong, since the original poster was flat out saying that icons were evil and should be replaced by text in all situations. I stand by my statement that the original poster is simply wrong - because all the evidence indicates that a great many people find icons useful, even if there may be a few outliers who do not. Regardless of your personal preference, it seems clear that it would be a UI design blunder to globally replace all icons with text buttons, which it seemed the original poster was implying.
Sorry, but you're wrong. And you've failed to grasp the point of icons.
The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.
But didn't the American auto industry deserve to be crippled in the 70s? The Japanese battered the American auto industry by being more efficient at producing cars. That's how free markets work - you do something more efficiently, cheaper, better, you win. And that's a Good Thing.
Similarly, if a bunch of people Someplace Else can write the same software cheaper than Americans can, then good for them! They deserve to get that software writing business.
I've seen a lot of whining about standards or costs of living, and clamouring for tarriffs, but why exactly is it that it's okay for US workers to earn vastly more than third world workers for doing essentially the same job? Why should a US worker have some divine right to be protected by tarriffs against his more economically efficient competitors in foreign lands?
There's nothing preventing open source software from getting the Windows XP approval from MS. So long as the packaged product does all the required things (installing in the right way, playing nice with the registry, blah, blah, blah), which are objective technical requirements, you're good to go. I don't recall the Windows XP logo program requiring a particular flavour of license for your software.
I'm pretty sure that if MS didn't approve your software simply because of the license agreement, you'd have strong grounds to sue them.
Yeah, I've often wished for an inverse to "+1, Informative". How about "-1, Just Plain Wrong" to be used when someone posts a puported fact which is simply incorrect (and not a matter of opinion)?
You're assuming the old skool model where apps are monolithic things completely separate from one another. These days, people try to build apps which reuse components. That's not sinister, it's just sane engineering.
If MS wants to build, say a componentized HTML renderer, or media playback library (DirectShow) that any application on Windows can use what's so wrong with that? All that IE and MediaPlayer are are simple wrappers around those reusable components.
If you think about it, apart from the very inner guts of the kernel, virtually everything an OS provides is some sort of reusable component for applications to take advantage of. Ten years ago, a TCP/IP stack was considered an exotic extra for Windows that one had to install separately. Now it's considered a part of the core system. Why are media codecs or HTML renderers conceptually different? (Or are you in favour of forcing MS to unbundle their evil monopolistic TCP/IP stack, fonts and graphical filesystem viewer?)
I buy into the sentiment to an extent, but still think there has to be a balance. As with any creative endeavour, "when it's done" is a matter of opinion, and some people (often the key creatives) will never think it's done. There's always something you could improve, given just a little bit more time. Sometimes, it's better just to ship and move on.
Giving people nearly unlimited time doesn't guarantee results. Does anyone believe that Duke Nukem Forever is going to be a killer title? Or will it be another Daikatana?
Deadlines sharpen the mind. It's the student essay syndrome.
"Seamus Blackley is a brilliant man that's never at a loss for words."
Well, that's half right, he certainly does talk a lot. Honestly, I think the main thing that's wrong with the games industry is pricks like Blackley who are more interested in acting like rock stars than in making games.
I think he's saying (possibly poorly translated), that it's the controls, and how the user actually engages with the character(s) they are controlling. That point of contact is the key thing to get right.
That's one thing he's nailed beautifully in his titles, and it's probably one reason they're so well received.
Not impossible, but certainly stupendouly expensive.
The London tube has a significant disadvantage compared to say the New York subway or Paris metro - London is built on clay. Being built on clay means that for the most part, the tube has to be buried very deep underground. In New York or Paris, the system runs mostly just below the surface. Being deep underground makes engineering work much more expensive, not to mention the fact that they constantly have to pump water out of the system to prevent it from flooding.
Unless people are prepared to pay, and pay big, the tube is not getting any better.
It's a public-key system. So although the public key is indeed somewhere on the box, so it can check the signature, the private key, which you use to sign the executables is (presumably) locked in a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
Sure, once I've decided to hire an H1-B, the legal folks are quite good at making sure I get my guy. However, you've entirely missed my point: why the decision to hire them was taken. I can absolutely assure you that cost had fuck all to do with it, because they are more expensive than their American counterparts.
Let me repeat that last part for you again, because you seem to have missed it: they are more expensive than their American counterparts.
The reason they are more expensive is that we pay them at least what we pay the Americans, and there are all sorts of additional costs associated with hiring them (e.g. legal fees for visa applications, international relocation costs). On top of that, it takes a while to get all the visa paperwork done, so you don't even get someone who can start right away.
So, as a matter fiscal responsibility, I should hire an American if I could find one to do the job. However, I just couldn't. And it's not as though I didn't try. We did an extensive search for candidates, and saw quite a few of them. Many of them had on paper qualifications that looked quite impressive, however there were plenty that performed terribly in interviews.
In particular, I needed people with strong math skills (speecially vector math). It's something that's taught very poorly in American high schools (and many American colleges too), so lots of otherwise promising looking American candidates just didn't make the grade. Since hiring someone who can't do the job is an expensive and difficult to rectify business mistake, I instead chose to hold out for candidates who knew what the fuck they were doing.
Many of the positions were open for several months, without being filled, because these were hard positions to fill. We advertised in relevant trade journals, posted the position on our website, and engaged recruitment agencies. Short of getting TV spots, it's hard to see what else we could have done - a far cry from your alleged 'obscure' placement. Getting candidates was easy. Getting candidates who looked like they might be qualified was moderately easy. Finding candidates who met our quality bar was very hard. When someone came along that met that bar, we offered them the job, and offered very competitive compensation packages. Mostly they were Americans, but sometimes they weren't.
Understand that I needed to fill these positions, as quickly as I could, but it would have been dumb to hire people who couldn't do the job. It was absolutely not in my interest to hire an H1-B who might take an extra couple of months to turn up, at great expense, if I could find an American to do the job.
If I'm "runing the tech market for Americans" by refusing to lower my quality bar, then I make no apology. Perhaps your wrath should be directed at the failing education system which means that I can find better (not cheaper) candidates in other countries?
Companies hire H1-B people because they are cheap, not because they are good.
Is that just an opinion, or do you have data to support that? My own anecdotal evidence is that this is not the case. I am a manager at a large American tech company. Last year I interviewed dozens of people for positions in my group, and hired 8 people. I have two people on H1-B visas in my team, and I can assure you that they must have been hired because I thought they were good, since they are certainly not cheap. They are paid at least as much as others with comparable roles and experience.
As others have noted, hiring an H1-B is a pain the ass. They take months to arrive, because of all the paperwork, and there is significant extra expense, especially if relocation is involved. All else being equal, I'd hire an American because it's cheaper and less hassle. If I hire an H1-B, it's because I can't find an American that would be as good at the job.
If I could find quality candidates that would work at 50% of the going rate (as you ludicrously suggest), then bring 'em on. However, I've yet to encounter these mythical individuals.
The headline for the GameSpy article was "Top Ten Shameful Games". It's also worth noting that within the industry, a game is also referred to as a 'title'. The terms are used almost interchangeably. I've also heard it used by console vendors to refer to any product that runs on their platform (in the hope, I assume, that someday a few of the 'titles' might not be games).
Does seem to be a somewhat arbitrary list, with a puzzling bias for games on very old systems. Sure, Custer's Revenge is clearly a shameful heap of junk, but some of the other choices seem arbitrary. Impossible Mission on the 2600 is not the only game to have shipped that was inadvertently impossible to beat, and as the article notes, it was otherwise a decent product.
Plus, how can anyone leave Trespasser off the list of worst gaming travesties? Not only was the game monumentally awful, but it was also accompanied by such stomach churningly over-the-top hype from Seamus "Media Whore" Blackley, that the resulting derision meant that he later felt compelled to 'redeem' himself by attempting to take credit for the Xbox.
Yeah, in theory (and contrived demos) this is all true. However, as a professional Xbox game developer, I can tell you that most performance problems I've seen to date have been code that is CPU bound. A lot of this has to do with some shortcomings of the NVidia GPU (lack of command-stream return stack or real index buffers, for example), which means the CPU spends quite a bit of time copying blocks of memory around for not a lot of good reason. (Yes, there are some ways to alleviate this, but they're not always viable.)
Overall, the Xbox is still a damn fine piece of kit to work with, and certainly an order of magnitude less of a pain-in-the-arse than the PS2, but it's not quite the performance monster in every situation that some people make it out to be.
Looks like they support up to the DX7 interfaces. Which is fine, but I'd imagine most recent apps are using the DX8 interfaces, which have been around for a while now, and MS have just shipped DX9.
So, this might be a viable route for porting old apps, but nothing leading edge.
To summarise, it basically says: "We support OpenGL, so if your app uses OpenGL, you'll have no problem". It then goes on to list a few things about OpenGL, which a seasoned OpenGL developer would already know.
At no point does it say what you should do if your Windows app is written using Direct3D. Not even a link to a D3D-to-GL porting guide.
Regardless of the relative merits of the two APIs, it's an undeniable fact that many 3D Windows apps use Direct3D, and it therefore seems like a pretty huge oversight for Apple to not even mention how one might go about porting them.
Well, perhaps because they might want to keep some quality control over what they ship? (Stop snickering in the back...) What if there were a fatal bug in the Sun JVM, perhaps a gaping security hole? If MS have to ship it exactly as Sun give it to them, and Sun take their sweet time about fixing, say, a frequently occuring crash bug (which would, in the case of the JVM, basically look to Joe User like IE going tits up), then I can see how MS would indeed suffer harm. It wouldn't matter how much they claimed it wasn't their fault - people would still blame them.
In fact, unless MS has at least some say over what they have to insert, doesn't this just give Sun carte blanch to insert random bugs in Windows? (Sure, you can have a good laugh about the ones that are already there, but why should someone else have a legal right to add new ones?)
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the email address of the MS rep: v-sashak@microsoft.com. The 'v-' at the beginning is, IIRC, Microspeak for 'not a Microsoft employee'. It's probably a contractor or agency temp that works events who has been given an MS mail account. Which would explain the less-than-clueful answers (and why (s)he has to speak to his/her manager).
And here's a revelation for you: if you read the post to which I was replying (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it seems likely that you would agree with me that (s)he was wrong, since the original poster was flat out saying that icons were evil and should be replaced by text in all situations. I stand by my statement that the original poster is simply wrong - because all the evidence indicates that a great many people find icons useful, even if there may be a few outliers who do not. Regardless of your personal preference, it seems clear that it would be a UI design blunder to globally replace all icons with text buttons, which it seemed the original poster was implying.
Those would be examples of poor icon designs then. That doesn't invalidate icons as a concept.
The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.
If they produce the same quality of work, but cost less, then they are more economically efficient. That's more or less by definition.
Similarly, if a bunch of people Someplace Else can write the same software cheaper than Americans can, then good for them! They deserve to get that software writing business.
I've seen a lot of whining about standards or costs of living, and clamouring for tarriffs, but why exactly is it that it's okay for US workers to earn vastly more than third world workers for doing essentially the same job? Why should a US worker have some divine right to be protected by tarriffs against his more economically efficient competitors in foreign lands?
Let the free market do its thing.
I'm pretty sure that if MS didn't approve your software simply because of the license agreement, you'd have strong grounds to sue them.
Yeah, I've often wished for an inverse to "+1, Informative". How about "-1, Just Plain Wrong" to be used when someone posts a puported fact which is simply incorrect (and not a matter of opinion)?
If MS wants to build, say a componentized HTML renderer, or media playback library (DirectShow) that any application on Windows can use what's so wrong with that? All that IE and MediaPlayer are are simple wrappers around those reusable components.
If you think about it, apart from the very inner guts of the kernel, virtually everything an OS provides is some sort of reusable component for applications to take advantage of. Ten years ago, a TCP/IP stack was considered an exotic extra for Windows that one had to install separately. Now it's considered a part of the core system. Why are media codecs or HTML renderers conceptually different? (Or are you in favour of forcing MS to unbundle their evil monopolistic TCP/IP stack, fonts and graphical filesystem viewer?)
I buy into the sentiment to an extent, but still think there has to be a balance. As with any creative endeavour, "when it's done" is a matter of opinion, and some people (often the key creatives) will never think it's done. There's always something you could improve, given just a little bit more time. Sometimes, it's better just to ship and move on.
Giving people nearly unlimited time doesn't guarantee results. Does anyone believe that Duke Nukem Forever is going to be a killer title? Or will it be another Daikatana?
Deadlines sharpen the mind. It's the student essay syndrome.
Well, that's half right, he certainly does talk a lot. Honestly, I think the main thing that's wrong with the games industry is pricks like Blackley who are more interested in acting like rock stars than in making games.
I think he's saying (possibly poorly translated), that it's the controls, and how the user actually engages with the character(s) they are controlling. That point of contact is the key thing to get right.
That's one thing he's nailed beautifully in his titles, and it's probably one reason they're so well received.
A man who defends himself has a fool for a client.
The London tube has a significant disadvantage compared to say the New York subway or Paris metro - London is built on clay. Being built on clay means that for the most part, the tube has to be buried very deep underground. In New York or Paris, the system runs mostly just below the surface. Being deep underground makes engineering work much more expensive, not to mention the fact that they constantly have to pump water out of the system to prevent it from flooding.
Unless people are prepared to pay, and pay big, the tube is not getting any better.
Look no further than Stars!. Sure, it doesn't look pretty, but for my money the gameplay takes MOO out back and gives it a damn good kicking.
It's a public-key system. So although the public key is indeed somewhere on the box, so it can check the signature, the private key, which you use to sign the executables is (presumably) locked in a filing cabinet in a disused lavatory somewhere in the bowels of Microsoft with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard".
Let me repeat that last part for you again, because you seem to have missed it: they are more expensive than their American counterparts.
The reason they are more expensive is that we pay them at least what we pay the Americans, and there are all sorts of additional costs associated with hiring them (e.g. legal fees for visa applications, international relocation costs). On top of that, it takes a while to get all the visa paperwork done, so you don't even get someone who can start right away.
So, as a matter fiscal responsibility, I should hire an American if I could find one to do the job. However, I just couldn't. And it's not as though I didn't try. We did an extensive search for candidates, and saw quite a few of them. Many of them had on paper qualifications that looked quite impressive, however there were plenty that performed terribly in interviews.
In particular, I needed people with strong math skills (speecially vector math). It's something that's taught very poorly in American high schools (and many American colleges too), so lots of otherwise promising looking American candidates just didn't make the grade. Since hiring someone who can't do the job is an expensive and difficult to rectify business mistake, I instead chose to hold out for candidates who knew what the fuck they were doing.
Many of the positions were open for several months, without being filled, because these were hard positions to fill. We advertised in relevant trade journals, posted the position on our website, and engaged recruitment agencies. Short of getting TV spots, it's hard to see what else we could have done - a far cry from your alleged 'obscure' placement. Getting candidates was easy. Getting candidates who looked like they might be qualified was moderately easy. Finding candidates who met our quality bar was very hard. When someone came along that met that bar, we offered them the job, and offered very competitive compensation packages. Mostly they were Americans, but sometimes they weren't.
Understand that I needed to fill these positions, as quickly as I could, but it would have been dumb to hire people who couldn't do the job. It was absolutely not in my interest to hire an H1-B who might take an extra couple of months to turn up, at great expense, if I could find an American to do the job.
If I'm "runing the tech market for Americans" by refusing to lower my quality bar, then I make no apology. Perhaps your wrath should be directed at the failing education system which means that I can find better (not cheaper) candidates in other countries?
Is that just an opinion, or do you have data to support that? My own anecdotal evidence is that this is not the case. I am a manager at a large American tech company. Last year I interviewed dozens of people for positions in my group, and hired 8 people. I have two people on H1-B visas in my team, and I can assure you that they must have been hired because I thought they were good, since they are certainly not cheap. They are paid at least as much as others with comparable roles and experience.
As others have noted, hiring an H1-B is a pain the ass. They take months to arrive, because of all the paperwork, and there is significant extra expense, especially if relocation is involved. All else being equal, I'd hire an American because it's cheaper and less hassle. If I hire an H1-B, it's because I can't find an American that would be as good at the job.
If I could find quality candidates that would work at 50% of the going rate (as you ludicrously suggest), then bring 'em on. However, I've yet to encounter these mythical individuals.
The headline for the GameSpy article was "Top Ten Shameful Games". It's also worth noting that within the industry, a game is also referred to as a 'title'. The terms are used almost interchangeably. I've also heard it used by console vendors to refer to any product that runs on their platform (in the hope, I assume, that someday a few of the 'titles' might not be games).
Plus, how can anyone leave Trespasser off the list of worst gaming travesties? Not only was the game monumentally awful, but it was also accompanied by such stomach churningly over-the-top hype from Seamus "Media Whore" Blackley, that the resulting derision meant that he later felt compelled to 'redeem' himself by attempting to take credit for the Xbox.
Overall, the Xbox is still a damn fine piece of kit to work with, and certainly an order of magnitude less of a pain-in-the-arse than the PS2, but it's not quite the performance monster in every situation that some people make it out to be.
Looks like they support up to the DX7 interfaces. Which is fine, but I'd imagine most recent apps are using the DX8 interfaces, which have been around for a while now, and MS have just shipped DX9.
So, this might be a viable route for porting old apps, but nothing leading edge.
To summarise, it basically says: "We support OpenGL, so if your app uses OpenGL, you'll have no problem". It then goes on to list a few things about OpenGL, which a seasoned OpenGL developer would already know.
At no point does it say what you should do if your Windows app is written using Direct3D. Not even a link to a D3D-to-GL porting guide.
Regardless of the relative merits of the two APIs, it's an undeniable fact that many 3D Windows apps use Direct3D, and it therefore seems like a pretty huge oversight for Apple to not even mention how one might go about porting them.
Well, perhaps because they might want to keep some quality control over what they ship? (Stop snickering in the back...) What if there were a fatal bug in the Sun JVM, perhaps a gaping security hole? If MS have to ship it exactly as Sun give it to them, and Sun take their sweet time about fixing, say, a frequently occuring crash bug (which would, in the case of the JVM, basically look to Joe User like IE going tits up), then I can see how MS would indeed suffer harm. It wouldn't matter how much they claimed it wasn't their fault - people would still blame them.
In fact, unless MS has at least some say over what they have to insert, doesn't this just give Sun carte blanch to insert random bugs in Windows? (Sure, you can have a good laugh about the ones that are already there, but why should someone else have a legal right to add new ones?)
Last I heard, MS internally use an (internally) modified version of Perforce called "Source Depot".