Yes, make the manager stay and see what us devs have to go though to make deadlines. Deadlines that are usually set by clueless managers. Especially if the manager is salaried and the workers are paid hourly. Get SOMETHING useful out of what the company is paying them.:)
There was an episode of the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century serial (back in 1979. Erin Gray::hotness!) where Buck went to a 'casino' and started to gamble. They threw him out for winning, saying that he must have a hidden calculator or something on him. Buck said that, no, he was just using his brain to play the game, and said something alluding to people not being able to think or do something basic like figure out odds or something like that.
Point is: casinos don't want people using their brains to play either. They want sheeple to throw their money away. By trying to weed out 'counters', they're admitting the targeting of stupid punters.
Wrong, the correct solution is for Apple to relinquish their vice-like control with the Apple Store and open up the iPhone/iTouch for people to do want they want with their expensive hardware. The 'squatters' are merely showing an example of how Apple's sole-source mentality isn't perfect, and how the red-taped complications around the Store is a farce. (oh, and thanks a freakin' lot Apple, for first charging $10 for the iTouch firmware update in June, then another $5 in September. Stop making people pay for YOUR bug fixes!)
I set up a sacrificial XP SP1 box in my DMZ, unpatched, no policies, file sharing on etc. leaving it wide open for a few weeks, right in the middle of the Conficker storm hype period. Just to see what would happen. Got tons of visitors trying to figure out Guest and Admin passwords (set to guest, password respectively). Even got a few petty IRC-bot infections. But I never got a working Conficker infection. The closest was a couple Conficker files that were dropped but wouldn't activate. I was disappointed at the hype over Conficker when it failed to pwn my n00b'd box.
... that I need to pony up the $9.95 to upgrade my 6-month old iPod Touch to firmware v3.0, or... wait, where's this going? Nowhere. I just wanted to vent that Apple wants $9.95 for a firmware upgrade that adds a few incremental features. Mine is under warranty, so why can't I upgrade for free? Oh, yeah. Because Apple are greedy bee-stards. Apple silencing the truth doesn't surprise me at all. I hope my pocket doesn't catch on fire now.
I read the Kindle DRM article the other day and that further cemented my opinion against it. The guy should return his Kindle. The Kindle is all about making money for Jeffy B., not revolutionizing the printed word for people.
First, don't assume everybody on your Christmas list can actually USE a USB key. You may be opening up yourself to noob hell ("Hey, you know that USB thing you sent? Well, since you know computer stuff, I've got this problem with Windows...")
I say, sell 'em all on Fleabay. Should be able to get a couple bucks each. Buy a deck of pre-stamped postcards. Give the kids next door $10 to crayon Christmas trees on them. There you go: organic, primitive. Etc.
Now do something for yourself instead. Like, buy some pr0n DVDs. Or pizza & wings. Hell, do both and have a night in. Enjoy yourself in multiple ways
My company has pagers from a national US company. We pay for the services yearly instead of dicking with monthly statements. Said company shuts off our pagers one day. We find out the hard way: no pages are being received, and direct-dial gave a 'services suspended' message.
When called, company claimed to have sent three statements, all of which we never received (not totally true: I received one statement dated as they indicated, but this statement showed we had a positive balance, and it was NOT a renewal notice). They also claimed to have sent billing-related pages to "the users". You'd think they would do something modern, like Email the primary contact on the account. That would be me. But they didn't.
I go through all of the hoops to expedite payment to have services turned back on. You know how corporate Accounts Payable works. They want to do it at the end of the month. So I pull strings to get it done sooner.
I wait for snail mail to deliver. Company receives check. Services are... not turned on. WTF? Simple- I call and learn that, even though we've just paid them in full, they require a $25 "reconnection" fee. You mean the payment of four-digits-left-of-the-decimal wasn't enough?
Simple reason: between the time that the claimed first statement was issued, all of the above fiasco happened, and they received payment, a hair over 90 days had passed. At 90 days, the account it "reclassified", and requires a reconnect fee. It was less than 90 days when we learned the services were shut off, and I started working on the payment process, so the fee wasn't required then. Makes sense?
No amount of explaining the circumstances to the customer service droid had any effect. Nor was having my call escalated to a supervisor and re-explaining the whole thing. Nothing would get the services turned back on. No sympathy at all. For a lousy $25
"30GB is not a huge library of stuff. 30GB isn't even enough to hold an mp3 collection let alone videos."
Rubbish! I've got 2000 songs on my 30G iPod Video, the entire Pink Floyd Pulse concert video, and Rush R30 concert video. And I've got a third of the drive still free.
It was looking good, until "All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly."
Almost had me hooked there. I don't 'do' activation, and resent the "Guilty until proven innocent" policy. Drop those and I buy Vista. Otherwise, suck it, Billy Goats.
Just bloody great. My company insists upon loading RetardPlayer in our workstation images. This will mean another high-priority patch. Patching is always painful- either the sudden unannounced Gift of Reboot, or the One-Hour-of-Death-Clock, that stays on top of everything. All for near-abandonware that nobody uses. Ah, if only we ran Linux.....
The last posting in the bug report nailed it. Too many politics involved with Debian. The whole "ice weasel" episode was enough warning that they've got a Bush in their White House.
Debian is ancient and past the prime of it's life. I wish Mozilla would just deny them the inclusion of Firefox. Then Debian can close doors and slip into the history books as the "distro that was good in 2004, when the 2.4 kernel was at it's prime".
It's not like Mozilla's requirements are demanding in any way either.
Go ahead and -1 me. You can't handle the truth anyway.
Long time ago, my mother bought some of these devices that supposedly repelled bugs, mosquitos etc. They were a set of four, and she put them in various places in the house. Likewise, they drove my ears frickin' bananas.
Take advantage of the fact that the old people, and do what I did: opened the boxes up and clipped the wire leading to the transducers.
The man can't hear the noise. Get access to the thing. Open it up. Do a little surgery.
Face it: Bungie = pwn3d by Microsoft..history time
on
Halo 2 Only on Vista
·
· Score: 1
C'mon, Bungie is the world's biggest Microsoft shill !
MicroShaft pwn3d them when StarSiege and Tribes were young'n's. They were decent games with a fresh paradigm, but built on aging engines (especially StarSiege), and failing due to Sierra's incompetance. Bungie had announced they were going to squirt out Halo for the PC... the concept and screens were looking good... even that annoying title music had been passed for a good while. And so Microslop bought them up- studio, code, souls. Everything.
Halo had the potential to become a great multiplayer app. Microsocks needed a killer game for Xbox. And so, the Borg descended.
Now Bill has stuck his hand in Bungie's user port, wiggled a few fingers, and out of the mouth of Bungie came the Vista announcement.
That accomplishes a major thing: the first brick in the wall of XP's retirement. Only in Microdink's mind, though.
Full cinematics, professional actors (and their union bullshit), professional voice talent... why do you think games are so high priced these days? Each new game must out-do the last, so more money is allocated to hire the people that apply the lipstick and makeup to the pig.
When the retail price of a game is $50 or more, it doesn't surprise me if people would rather wait for it to go 'bargain bin' or 'used' rather than buying new. No sense getting burned on a lousy game. Again. *ahem* Don't you see games becoming the next 'used car' market?
Hokey/hostile copy protection schemes such as Steam and Starforce aren't helping matters either. No sense ragging on Steam since it has been hashed out here before, and Starforce's hardware/software-hostility has a cult following of gamers who stay informed of titles NOT to buy.
Finding software flaws -ahem- 'exploits'... is en vogue at the moment. Unfortunately this is also the catalyst for additional needless security, DRM, policies. Instead of putting resources towards development or improvement, the resources are wasted on finding minute problems. Sure this effort could make software better for the future (reliable, secure), but the bureaucracy is putting us farther behind, and is creating more work with less usable results.
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Yes, make the manager stay and see what us devs have to go though to make deadlines. Deadlines that are usually set by clueless managers. Especially if the manager is salaried and the workers are paid hourly. Get SOMETHING useful out of what the company is paying them. :)
There was an episode of the old Buck Rogers in the 25th Century serial (back in 1979. Erin Gray::hotness!) where Buck went to a 'casino' and started to gamble. They threw him out for winning, saying that he must have a hidden calculator or something on him. Buck said that, no, he was just using his brain to play the game, and said something alluding to people not being able to think or do something basic like figure out odds or something like that.
Point is: casinos don't want people using their brains to play either. They want sheeple to throw their money away. By trying to weed out 'counters', they're admitting the targeting of stupid punters.
Wrong, the correct solution is for Apple to relinquish their vice-like control with the Apple Store and open up the iPhone/iTouch for people to do want they want with their expensive hardware. The 'squatters' are merely showing an example of how Apple's sole-source mentality isn't perfect, and how the red-taped complications around the Store is a farce. (oh, and thanks a freakin' lot Apple, for first charging $10 for the iTouch firmware update in June, then another $5 in September. Stop making people pay for YOUR bug fixes!)
I set up a sacrificial XP SP1 box in my DMZ, unpatched, no policies, file sharing on etc. leaving it wide open for a few weeks, right in the middle of the Conficker storm hype period. Just to see what would happen. Got tons of visitors trying to figure out Guest and Admin passwords (set to guest, password respectively). Even got a few petty IRC-bot infections. But I never got a working Conficker infection. The closest was a couple Conficker files that were dropped but wouldn't activate. I was disappointed at the hype over Conficker when it failed to pwn my n00b'd box.
... that I need to pony up the $9.95 to upgrade my 6-month old iPod Touch to firmware v3.0, or... wait, where's this going? Nowhere. I just wanted to vent that Apple wants $9.95 for a firmware upgrade that adds a few incremental features. Mine is under warranty, so why can't I upgrade for free? Oh, yeah. Because Apple are greedy bee-stards. Apple silencing the truth doesn't surprise me at all. I hope my pocket doesn't catch on fire now.
Modding down by Apple fanboiz in 5...4...3...
I read the Kindle DRM article the other day and that further cemented my opinion against it. The guy should return his Kindle. The Kindle is all about making money for Jeffy B., not revolutionizing the printed word for people.
http://www.geardiary.com/2009/06/19/kindles-drm-rears-its-ugly-head-and-it-is-ugly/
First, don't assume everybody on your Christmas list can actually USE a USB key. You may be opening up yourself to noob hell ("Hey, you know that USB thing you sent? Well, since you know computer stuff, I've got this problem with Windows...")
I say, sell 'em all on Fleabay. Should be able to get a couple bucks each. Buy a deck of pre-stamped postcards. Give the kids next door $10 to crayon Christmas trees on them. There you go: organic, primitive. Etc.
Now do something for yourself instead. Like, buy some pr0n DVDs. Or pizza & wings. Hell, do both and have a night in. Enjoy yourself in multiple ways
A Verizon-like story for the bored.
My company has pagers from a national US company. We pay for the services yearly instead of dicking with monthly statements. Said company shuts off our pagers one day. We find out the hard way: no pages are being received, and direct-dial gave a 'services suspended' message.
When called, company claimed to have sent three statements, all of which we never received (not totally true: I received one statement dated as they indicated, but this statement showed we had a positive balance, and it was NOT a renewal notice). They also claimed to have sent billing-related pages to "the users". You'd think they would do something modern, like Email the primary contact on the account. That would be me. But they didn't.
I go through all of the hoops to expedite payment to have services turned back on. You know how corporate Accounts Payable works. They want to do it at the end of the month. So I pull strings to get it done sooner.
I wait for snail mail to deliver. Company receives check. Services are... not turned on. WTF? Simple- I call and learn that, even though we've just paid them in full, they require a $25 "reconnection" fee. You mean the payment of four-digits-left-of-the-decimal wasn't enough?
Simple reason: between the time that the claimed first statement was issued, all of the above fiasco happened, and they received payment, a hair over 90 days had passed. At 90 days, the account it "reclassified", and requires a reconnect fee. It was less than 90 days when we learned the services were shut off, and I started working on the payment process, so the fee wasn't required then. Makes sense?
No amount of explaining the circumstances to the customer service droid had any effect. Nor was having my call escalated to a supervisor and re-explaining the whole thing. Nothing would get the services turned back on. No sympathy at all. For a lousy $25
USA Mobility lost us as a customer that day.
As long as I can get an "iFart" clone for the WMD.
Seriously, I'd rather wear a "Hello Kitty" t-shirt than use a WMD.
"30GB is not a huge library of stuff. 30GB isn't even enough to hold an mp3 collection let alone videos."
Rubbish! I've got 2000 songs on my 30G iPod Video, the entire Pink Floyd Pulse concert video, and Rush R30 concert video. And I've got a third of the drive still free.
It was looking good, until "All copies of Windows Vista still require activation and the system will continue to validate from time to time to verify that systems are activated properly."
Almost had me hooked there. I don't 'do' activation, and resent the "Guilty until proven innocent" policy. Drop those and I buy Vista. Otherwise, suck it, Billy Goats.
Just bloody great. My company insists upon loading RetardPlayer in our workstation images. This will mean another high-priority patch. Patching is always painful- either the sudden unannounced Gift of Reboot, or the One-Hour-of-Death-Clock, that stays on top of everything. All for near-abandonware that nobody uses. Ah, if only we ran Linux.....
The last posting in the bug report nailed it. Too many politics involved with Debian. The whole "ice weasel" episode was enough warning that they've got a Bush in their White House.
"The author clearly believes that Vista wins across these categories." Wow, a sock puppet article.
Debian is ancient and past the prime of it's life. I wish Mozilla would just deny them the inclusion of Firefox. Then Debian can close doors and slip into the history books as the "distro that was good in 2004, when the 2.4 kernel was at it's prime".
It's not like Mozilla's requirements are demanding in any way either.
Go ahead and -1 me. You can't handle the truth anyway.
Long time ago, my mother bought some of these devices that supposedly repelled bugs, mosquitos etc. They were a set of four, and she put them in various places in the house. Likewise, they drove my ears frickin' bananas.
Take advantage of the fact that the old people, and do what I did: opened the boxes up and clipped the wire leading to the transducers.
The man can't hear the noise. Get access to the thing. Open it up. Do a little surgery.
C'mon, Bungie is the world's biggest Microsoft shill !
MicroShaft pwn3d them when StarSiege and Tribes were young'n's. They were decent games with a fresh paradigm, but built on aging engines (especially StarSiege), and failing due to Sierra's incompetance. Bungie had announced they were going to squirt out Halo for the PC... the concept and screens were looking good... even that annoying title music had been passed for a good while. And so Microslop bought them up- studio, code, souls. Everything.
Halo had the potential to become a great multiplayer app. Microsocks needed a killer game for Xbox. And so, the Borg descended.
Now Bill has stuck his hand in Bungie's user port, wiggled a few fingers, and out of the mouth of Bungie came the Vista announcement.
That accomplishes a major thing: the first brick in the wall of XP's retirement. Only in Microdink's mind, though.
Full cinematics, professional actors (and their union bullshit), professional voice talent... why do you think games are so high priced these days? Each new game must out-do the last, so more money is allocated to hire the people that apply the lipstick and makeup to the pig.
Good games don't need this.
When the retail price of a game is $50 or more, it doesn't surprise me if people would rather wait for it to go 'bargain bin' or 'used' rather than buying new. No sense getting burned on a lousy game. Again. *ahem* Don't you see games becoming the next 'used car' market?
Hokey/hostile copy protection schemes such as Steam and Starforce aren't helping matters either. No sense ragging on Steam since it has been hashed out here before, and Starforce's hardware/software-hostility has a cult following of gamers who stay informed of titles NOT to buy.
Finding software flaws -ahem- 'exploits' ... is en vogue at the moment. Unfortunately this is also the catalyst for additional needless security, DRM, policies. Instead of putting resources towards development or improvement, the resources are wasted on finding minute problems. Sure this effort could make software better for the future (reliable, secure), but the bureaucracy is putting us farther behind, and is creating more work with less usable results.