It's not that nobody should be able to reach them. As an sysadmin role myself at the mo (I've worked in most jobs in IT over the years), it's a case that I've only got time to field a limited set of things. These are the things that change the big picture in the infrastructure, and that's what takes most of my time.
I'd like to be able to help out more with the individual systems, seriously... The techs that get to go out and fix the small problems are the knights in shining armour; they get to fix the smaller mistakes that users get themselves into (oops, I accidentally deleted some files, oh my PC works again now you've fixed it, so on). The people that do know me are the heads of departments; they filter in requests that make a business sense to them, and request that they be implemented as a technical solution. Things relevant to the business in the wider scope make it to me.
When I took on the role, it had an inordinate amount of calls from users who wanted to short circuit the help desk (no logging means we can't prove we've done the work to the accountants for a start). Everyone's work, to them, is top priority, after all, it's they who are affected. It took a while to get that under control, and even to people who I consider friends in the organisation, if it's one PC that's affected, it really isn't my problem. If a thousand are, it probably is my problem.
To run a company, roles need a frame of reference. Some make the mistake of believing their frame is the whole of everything that is (hint, it's not). The further you work from your core frame, the less effective you are at doing the core work. If you find your strengths are in a different frame, you're in the wrong job, so change that.
Assuming you should be able to go direct to the admin assumes you know the technical impact of the problem you have (in the enterprise wide scope), know exactly how to describe it, how it's impacting every other system, the amount of users affected and a whole host of things (which is a picture that's built up by the Helpdesk and escalates through the technicians). If you've spent time doing that, what have you been doing in your real job? There may be many people with your level of skill also phoning the help desk, and they may have different views and conclusions based on a different geographic/business perspective. Doing things the right way lets an accurate picture be built. If all 5k+ staff phoned me in a huge incident, I'd neither be able to get a real picture of it, communicate with the people I needed to, nor actually talk to most people. I'd also not be fixing the problem, which is the real kicker.
Incidentally, HR does work that way; it's the only way they can research the query, and give me an accurate answer that lets me work on a factual basis (rather than "Oh, I seem to remember that it's something to do with X. Probably. Bye then."
Forcing people to use mandatory processes? Well, whatever next? Why does turning up for work when you have a hangover from the night before have to be mandatory? Doesn't suit your problems very well?
For every person's problem that's fixed by altering a process, it may well be that hundreds are adversely affected by that change. In an enterprise, there are often checks and processes in place to ensure that hundreds of projects and tasks can occur simultaneously, all being balanced and prioritised. What the company needs to happen will happen, when it's appropriate that it happens, in the interests of the company.
If you have a solution, present it as a business case. Sometimes, you may find you were right. Mostly, you'll get your eyes opened to a wider picture than you normally see, and the explanation "we don't do that, because it doesn't work under the majority of circumstances we face in the big picture".
Whoah... The sysadmin is the person responsible for making sure the production environment is stable, and for fixing the problems that arise there. They're the ones that know the theory and practice of keeping the big iron running. If they're not to touch the production environment, then who? And if you say "developers", I'll consider it a marvelous joke. In your healthcare analogy, sysadmins are the "top consultant" in the specialist area. There's one of them to many technicians; technicians are the eyes and ears (and sometimes extra hands) for the sysadmins.. Those would be more akin to the registrars etc. and Junior Doctors. The Helpdesk staff would be more akin to the nurses; they can be trusted with a lot, but I certainly wouldn't want them holding the scalpel in surgery on me.
Developers are more like the drug vendors. They do essential work, and they understand how it affects the patient in specifics, but I'd really not trust them to rock up in an operating theater and wield the scalpel.
So, you can fix one problem in your area that affects you before the admin team? Great. What does the fix do to the rest of company? How many other people and problems are the admins working on? Sounds like you can cope with the really simple stuff, but you've not mentioned anything about scaled up problem solving (believe me, most people can solve a simple network or PC issue; scaling it up to deal with heterogenous systems on a large network is another thing entirely).
We don't actually depend on them though. In some places, they're creating new markets, which if they prove viable, will then have competition from other areas. In some places, they're simply competing against other companies for space in an existing market. Now, if Google became mandated by the world's governmental organisation and granted eternal monopoly, I'd have a problem with it, but so far, I don't find much that they do (apart from the depth of the data gather) even remotely related to a dystopic world. Unless you include 'Brave New World', and that's not your usual dystopia.
Except it doesn't work that way. By having your game _require_ that feature, you've shifted the demographic that it appeals to. The rest of the numbers you gather entirely miss out the tranche you've alienated, but doesn't show that in the figures. The most important strategy is to get games out there and sold. If you don't have revenue, you don't have a company. Sure, it's _nice_ to know more, but if it affects the bottom line of getting the games sold, then it should be a "No". What companies don't understand is that changes of mindset are glacial; they don't fit into the strategy of "how much can we screw out of people in the next 3 years". Fine, in those 3 years, you make a fair bit of money, but you alter the perception of your customer base (from one of "I can accept this bargain" to more of "I'll think very carefully about dealing with them again"). Once opinion has shifted, it's a pain to get it back as that change has a lot of inertia, and that will result in a lot of sales that aren't made as people find something else to spend the money on. If it's not there now, it will be; maybe it'll be going back to the more traditional things that have temporarily been put aside.. And on a shift like that, it's highly possible to have a company destroying trend (or at least, very damaging). So, the "immediately test out different advertising strategies" is really "test out different immediate advertising tactics" rather than "test out a strategy that'll give us long term prospects". Thinking short term is always a huge gamble. Sometimes it pays off.. When it doesn't, it wreak havoc on a wide scope.
Except you can sell on a car, and it'll run on the fuel you put into it. What's actually happening is that companies are attempting to make sure that after the initial sale, if your logic worked as you were intimating with that analogy, the car wouldn't work by putting the correct fuel in it, unless you'd paid to have the car unlocked by the original company that manufactured it. And this company enforced a set of rules that ensured it got a massive share of the original price of the car just to perform an administrative function of saying "Yes, you now own the car". Now, none of your friends would be able to drive it unless you paid the fee to this company, so there'd be no lending it to someone for the weekend while you didn't need it, and it covered their car being in for repairs or something. You couldn't give it away, without the authority of this company (who you'd have to pay for the privilege of giving it away, even though you'd purchased it and now were the owner by law). So, in effect, you'd not be buying a "car", as that describes a vehicle that moves when you put fuel in it. You'd be buying an expensive heap of junk that you'd need to pay a third party (who has no legal right to be involved in the resale of the car, apart from them putting a 'tracking' system of owner in there that won't let the heap of metal do anything, even open the doors, unless you pay them this money). Unless you can play this game, as is, on the console, you can't describe it as a game for the console, because it isn't. It's a medium with data on it. That data is not a game, and can't be described as one, because if you put it in the console with the expectation that it'd work, you'd find it didn't. That doesn't meet the criteria for being described as a workable game.
It'd be a very interesting fight if people took it up en masse; I don't think it's as cut and dried as you make out.
You know the NHS in the UK uses exchange, right? That's a pretty sizable organisation. The message loss there is zero, and it's trusted to send some pretty important (i.e. potentially life and death) information. Oh, and turnaround is pretty much seconds too.. Not a Microsoft fan here, but it really does sound like your exchange admins didn't have a clue. If you had admins, and it wasn't a company that let some 'external' entity set up a bodge job on the cheap, and just let it run unattended because "they didn't see the point in having anyone look after a machine that just sends email"..
For those that have even a fragment of history, you'll remember that the middle east used to be a center of learning and science. In the days of the crusades, their scientific knowledge far outstripped that of Europe (there's a reason the numerals we use today are called "arabic numerals". So, what happened to change that? Did Europe suddenly invest massively in science to go toe to toe? Alas not. Religious zealots got in places of power, and started to dictate that the progress of science was "against the will of god" (as the priesthood didn't understand it, so it scared them, and anything that scares a religious zealot is "against the will of god"). The role of religion in Europe started to lessen, allowing scientific method to progress apace and advancement to occur.
There's a reason ethics committees exist for scientific projects; the lay-people on them are a voice for the average person: They force the people doing pure science to think carefully about ramifications of performing experimentation in a particular fashion (is the experiment ethical? Can the way it's performed in a different way, not affecting the core of the theory, that is ethical?). The professionals are there to ensure the science is actually valid and to pick out the ones sloppily created that are mathematically wrong, or are unable by structure to draw the conclusions they're looking for from the experiments performed.
I'm vaguely hopeful that this incursion of zealotry into the workings of scientific progress can be rooted out and cast aside, but from the path that the US has been following towards a combination between a corporate feudalism headed by a close to a theocracy (what are the chances of an atheist being elected president these days, since the pledge of allegiance was altered in 1954 to include the "under god" segment; no, for you younger ones, that wasn't part of the original, and was tagged on for political ends), it's not a certainty. That's somewhat worrying really.
$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem. You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day. There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.
Actually, on the 'always on', the legitimate players hate it too.. And those of us that have been gaming since the early 80s (hell, the late '70s), we've seen companies come and go, so there's no expectation that they'll still be hosting a game you may just want to play in another 30 or so years (there are still ones that I'll pull out and play after nearly 20 years, just for the nostalgia trip and the fun of rediscovering forgotten stories).
There's network outages, routing problems, straight denial of service attacks (or compromises of the login servers creating mayhem), playing on a train, a plane, or even in a campsite (I actually enjoy camping; gets me to some very strange places, and a laptop is great for the rainy days; usually used for on site photo manipulation of the shots I take out and about). Online only, for most games, is an artifical single point of failure. It'll mess up a product you paid for with no warning, and possibly irrevocably, all out of your control, with you having absolutely no recourse. That, to me, is an incredibly bad deal. If it's a bad game, then people will be less likely to buy from them again (exacerbated by the online only issues, meaning an even smaller available market, possibly making the difference between surviving as a company and going under). You don't care about the longevity, but you're left with a bad taste. If it's a great one, then it's not going to be around for the nostalgia trip. When gaming lines are shut down by an active company, then players will be more wary still. For all the 'big business' groups, thinking that this solves all their piracy woes, they'll be meeting the laws of unintended consequences, where games that don't follow this will have the exposure, thus the following (maybe not immediately, but eventually).. The following generates the sales. The sales bring in the cash, and cash is the lifeblood of a company. Best analogy of the companies following this route is "Emo". It's very much an "I'll cut myself because I don't like a few people". Not the hard core self harmers who are actually ill, but the ones who'll do it for attention and because they think it'll make them edgy, or gain an advantage, whereas in the long run, it'll likely turn out to be self defeating, pointless and rather embarrassing.
Yes, I understand Capitalism fairly well. Communism, in its truest sense, is the utopia form of society, being very inclusive. The biggest problem with it is human nature, which pretty much ensures that it'll be subverted and exploited. It's what we should be working towards as a species (until something better can be formulated, which it probably will at some point). Capitalism is confrontational and warlike, and very exclusive. It's an evolution of the strongest (not necessarily the optimum) under certain constraints, many of which are part of the system itself. It's quite destructive in many ways, doesn't often hit the optimum strategies for the species wide constraints, but is very much in tune with current human behaviour (we're still a pretty primitive, warlike species). In the wider scale, at the moment, I'd choose Capitalism over Communism, simply because it works, right now. However, I'm hopeful that someday we'll be better than that.
The problem being that many of the people invoking it, and not having a real understanding of it, manage to get other people in court and charged with offenses anyway.
Why do you think Citrix did so well, and the whole application virtualisation stack? RDP and VNC are ok for some things, but they simply lack the power, elegance and utility of network transparency.
Because speed limits are arbitrary figures thought up to cover an arbitrary distance, not tailored to every stretch of road, and not always making sense. When applied as a "rule of thumb" as to how fast is generally considered reasonable, they're great. Going at, say, twice that limit is silly in most cases (60 in a 30 limit? Most of the time, that's ridiculous.. Except where there's a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere that for some reason is signed as being a 30 limit). When you apply rigorous enforcement of arbitrary values, you have a system that doesn't make sense for the purported purpose, and when that happens, you have people ignoring it when it's useful, as well as when it's completely barmy. Someone short changing you in retail is technically theft; if that were enforced in the same way as driving over the speeding limit, everyone in retail on tills would be out of a job in months.
No, it's just kids being kids. I had my tearaway years too (who didn't?).. Looking back, it's a wonder I survived some of them. Teenagers are neurologically wired to make bad decisions (or reckless ones); part of the learning process that let us survive and adapt as a species (one of those 'reckless' ideas may turn out to have a phenomenal payoff). Unfortunately, some just get themselves killed. That, alas, is the way the world works. It's not safe. Wrapping kids up in cotton wool simply means they're less able to judge the riskier stuff when they encounter it later in life (when they probably don't have the parental balancing), which leads to far bigger problems. Parental balance can help, but it doesn't make that side of nature go away.
Not a lot. The bit that bugs me, is when I was learning to drive, all the advertisements were about how to read the road, how to be safe, how to risk manage the speed you drove at. Also, pedestrians/cyclists were warned that cars were big heavy boxes of death that hurt when they hit you, not sources of revenue when you ended up in hospital. People used to be asked to pay attention to what they were doing. Now, as a pedestrian etc., if you jump out in front of a car, it's automatically the driver's fault. You claim on insurance, and get a hefty wad of money. If you think this isn't abused, try working in a hospital and listen to some of the people gabble about how the damage they get is going to pay for a nice easy life for them, and how they planned it. And they say it with pride, as if they're clever! It really doesn't enter their heads that jumping in front of a car may kill them, or at least mean they're on expensive surgeries for a lifetime (hey, NHS, or choose your own insurance makes all that free, right?).
A lot of drivers learning these days aren't taught to drive according to the road. They're taught to drive to an arbitrary speed limit. I know a goodly many stretches of road that I'd never drive anywhere _near_ the legal limit, as it's plain not safe... I also drive other stretches at over the speed limit, because it _is_ safe. People that slavishly follow an arbitrary number on a sign are heading for a world of pain. Speed isn't the problem, it's the other driving practices that usually go with it (texting, having a phone jammed against the ear and trying corners one handed, not paying attention, blind overtaking etc. etc.). If you go after the root causes (hint, it's not usually just speed), then you lower the accidents, reducing the fatalities greatly.
And before you say "if accidents happened to those close to you": My folks were near killed in a head on crash. The other driver was speeding. On the wrong side of the road, and three times over the alcohol limit. Guess which one of that would have made the accident not happen? My Brother was T-Boned by a car going inside the legal limit (national speed limit) coming out of a blind junction. An element of bad luck there, but the analysis of the other driver was he was just on the alcohol limit, and hadn't taken any notice of signs saying concealed junction, slow and all the other warnings that something dangerous was ahead, likely because he was on his mobile phone (yes he was mid call at the point of accident). That landed him on life support for a month.
Sister, knocked over on a pedestrian crossing, and thrown forward into the path of a car coming the other direction. Inside the legal speed limit, but just not paying attention. It took a defib unit to get her heart beat back, and years of physio to get her walking properly.
The simple fact is that if you don't drive a car, or get in one and never move in it, then you have an almost zero chance of causing death. As soon as it moves, that chance increases. The aim is to prevent accidents, not allow as many as you like, and just say "well, mitigate it by moving everything slowly". Take care of the root cause first.
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Ho many of them are called up at 3am in the morning on a day off?
It's not that nobody should be able to reach them. As an sysadmin role myself at the mo (I've worked in most jobs in IT over the years), it's a case that I've only got time to field a limited set of things. These are the things that change the big picture in the infrastructure, and that's what takes most of my time.
I'd like to be able to help out more with the individual systems, seriously... The techs that get to go out and fix the small problems are the knights in shining armour; they get to fix the smaller mistakes that users get themselves into (oops, I accidentally deleted some files, oh my PC works again now you've fixed it, so on).
The people that do know me are the heads of departments; they filter in requests that make a business sense to them, and request that they be implemented as a technical solution. Things relevant to the business in the wider scope make it to me.
When I took on the role, it had an inordinate amount of calls from users who wanted to short circuit the help desk (no logging means we can't prove we've done the work to the accountants for a start). Everyone's work, to them, is top priority, after all, it's they who are affected. It took a while to get that under control, and even to people who I consider friends in the organisation, if it's one PC that's affected, it really isn't my problem. If a thousand are, it probably is my problem.
To run a company, roles need a frame of reference. Some make the mistake of believing their frame is the whole of everything that is (hint, it's not). The further you work from your core frame, the less effective you are at doing the core work. If you find your strengths are in a different frame, you're in the wrong job, so change that.
Assuming you should be able to go direct to the admin assumes you know the technical impact of the problem you have (in the enterprise wide scope), know exactly how to describe it, how it's impacting every other system, the amount of users affected and a whole host of things (which is a picture that's built up by the Helpdesk and escalates through the technicians). If you've spent time doing that, what have you been doing in your real job? There may be many people with your level of skill also phoning the help desk, and they may have different views and conclusions based on a different geographic/business perspective.
Doing things the right way lets an accurate picture be built. If all 5k+ staff phoned me in a huge incident, I'd neither be able to get a real picture of it, communicate with the people I needed to, nor actually talk to most people. I'd also not be fixing the problem, which is the real kicker.
Incidentally, HR does work that way; it's the only way they can research the query, and give me an accurate answer that lets me work on a factual basis (rather than "Oh, I seem to remember that it's something to do with X. Probably. Bye then."
Forcing people to use mandatory processes? Well, whatever next? Why does turning up for work when you have a hangover from the night before have to be mandatory? Doesn't suit your problems very well?
For every person's problem that's fixed by altering a process, it may well be that hundreds are adversely affected by that change. In an enterprise, there are often checks and processes in place to ensure that hundreds of projects and tasks can occur simultaneously, all being balanced and prioritised. What the company needs to happen will happen, when it's appropriate that it happens, in the interests of the company.
If you have a solution, present it as a business case. Sometimes, you may find you were right. Mostly, you'll get your eyes opened to a wider picture than you normally see, and the explanation "we don't do that, because it doesn't work under the majority of circumstances we face in the big picture".
Whoah... The sysadmin is the person responsible for making sure the production environment is stable, and for fixing the problems that arise there. They're the ones that know the theory and practice of keeping the big iron running.
If they're not to touch the production environment, then who? And if you say "developers", I'll consider it a marvelous joke.
In your healthcare analogy, sysadmins are the "top consultant" in the specialist area. There's one of them to many technicians; technicians are the eyes and ears (and sometimes extra hands) for the sysadmins.. Those would be more akin to the registrars etc. and Junior Doctors.
The Helpdesk staff would be more akin to the nurses; they can be trusted with a lot, but I certainly wouldn't want them holding the scalpel in surgery on me.
Developers are more like the drug vendors. They do essential work, and they understand how it affects the patient in specifics, but I'd really not trust them to rock up in an operating theater and wield the scalpel.
So, you can fix one problem in your area that affects you before the admin team? Great. What does the fix do to the rest of company? How many other people and problems are the admins working on?
Sounds like you can cope with the really simple stuff, but you've not mentioned anything about scaled up problem solving (believe me, most people can solve a simple network or PC issue; scaling it up to deal with heterogenous systems on a large network is another thing entirely).
We don't actually depend on them though. In some places, they're creating new markets, which if they prove viable, will then have competition from other areas. In some places, they're simply competing against other companies for space in an existing market.
Now, if Google became mandated by the world's governmental organisation and granted eternal monopoly, I'd have a problem with it, but so far, I don't find much that they do (apart from the depth of the data gather) even remotely related to a dystopic world. Unless you include 'Brave New World', and that's not your usual dystopia.
Except it doesn't work that way. By having your game _require_ that feature, you've shifted the demographic that it appeals to. The rest of the numbers you gather entirely miss out the tranche you've alienated, but doesn't show that in the figures.
The most important strategy is to get games out there and sold. If you don't have revenue, you don't have a company. Sure, it's _nice_ to know more, but if it affects the bottom line of getting the games sold, then it should be a "No".
What companies don't understand is that changes of mindset are glacial; they don't fit into the strategy of "how much can we screw out of people in the next 3 years".
Fine, in those 3 years, you make a fair bit of money, but you alter the perception of your customer base (from one of "I can accept this bargain" to more of "I'll think very carefully about dealing with them again"). Once opinion has shifted, it's a pain to get it back as that change has a lot of inertia, and that will result in a lot of sales that aren't made as people find something else to spend the money on. If it's not there now, it will be; maybe it'll be going back to the more traditional things that have temporarily been put aside.. And on a shift like that, it's highly possible to have a company destroying trend (or at least, very damaging).
So, the "immediately test out different advertising strategies" is really "test out different immediate advertising tactics" rather than "test out a strategy that'll give us long term prospects".
Thinking short term is always a huge gamble. Sometimes it pays off.. When it doesn't, it wreak havoc on a wide scope.
Depends on your quantum spin.
Except you can sell on a car, and it'll run on the fuel you put into it.
What's actually happening is that companies are attempting to make sure that after the initial sale, if your logic worked as you were intimating with that analogy, the car wouldn't work by putting the correct fuel in it, unless you'd paid to have the car unlocked by the original company that manufactured it. And this company enforced a set of rules that ensured it got a massive share of the original price of the car just to perform an administrative function of saying "Yes, you now own the car".
Now, none of your friends would be able to drive it unless you paid the fee to this company, so there'd be no lending it to someone for the weekend while you didn't need it, and it covered their car being in for repairs or something. You couldn't give it away, without the authority of this company (who you'd have to pay for the privilege of giving it away, even though you'd purchased it and now were the owner by law).
So, in effect, you'd not be buying a "car", as that describes a vehicle that moves when you put fuel in it. You'd be buying an expensive heap of junk that you'd need to pay a third party (who has no legal right to be involved in the resale of the car, apart from them putting a 'tracking' system of owner in there that won't let the heap of metal do anything, even open the doors, unless you pay them this money).
Unless you can play this game, as is, on the console, you can't describe it as a game for the console, because it isn't. It's a medium with data on it. That data is not a game, and can't be described as one, because if you put it in the console with the expectation that it'd work, you'd find it didn't. That doesn't meet the criteria for being described as a workable game.
It'd be a very interesting fight if people took it up en masse; I don't think it's as cut and dried as you make out.
You know the NHS in the UK uses exchange, right? That's a pretty sizable organisation. The message loss there is zero, and it's trusted to send some pretty important (i.e. potentially life and death) information.
Oh, and turnaround is pretty much seconds too.. Not a Microsoft fan here, but it really does sound like your exchange admins didn't have a clue. If you had admins, and it wasn't a company that let some 'external' entity set up a bodge job on the cheap, and just let it run unattended because "they didn't see the point in having anyone look after a machine that just sends email"..
For those that have even a fragment of history, you'll remember that the middle east used to be a center of learning and science.
In the days of the crusades, their scientific knowledge far outstripped that of Europe (there's a reason the numerals we use today are called "arabic numerals".
So, what happened to change that? Did Europe suddenly invest massively in science to go toe to toe? Alas not. Religious zealots got in places of power, and started to dictate that the progress of science was "against the will of god" (as the priesthood didn't understand it, so it scared them, and anything that scares a religious zealot is "against the will of god"). The role of religion in Europe started to lessen, allowing scientific method to progress apace and advancement to occur.
There's a reason ethics committees exist for scientific projects; the lay-people on them are a voice for the average person: They force the people doing pure science to think carefully about ramifications of performing experimentation in a particular fashion (is the experiment ethical? Can the way it's performed in a different way, not affecting the core of the theory, that is ethical?). The professionals are there to ensure the science is actually valid and to pick out the ones sloppily created that are mathematically wrong, or are unable by structure to draw the conclusions they're looking for from the experiments performed.
I'm vaguely hopeful that this incursion of zealotry into the workings of scientific progress can be rooted out and cast aside, but from the path that the US has been following towards a combination between a corporate feudalism headed by a close to a theocracy (what are the chances of an atheist being elected president these days, since the pledge of allegiance was altered in 1954 to include the "under god" segment; no, for you younger ones, that wasn't part of the original, and was tagged on for political ends), it's not a certainty. That's somewhat worrying really.
$168k for a technician? Fully loaded in Europe, you're probably looking at about $40k for a full loading on tech resource necessary to diagnose and fix this kind of problem.
You don't necessarily need config control to do a fix, though that would likely entail one later on through the sysops and change control processes worked into the standard working day.
There are so many inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in that post that it really did give me a chuckle.
Actually, on the 'always on', the legitimate players hate it too.. And those of us that have been gaming since the early 80s (hell, the late '70s), we've seen companies come and go, so there's no expectation that they'll still be hosting a game you may just want to play in another 30 or so years (there are still ones that I'll pull out and play after nearly 20 years, just for the nostalgia trip and the fun of rediscovering forgotten stories).
There's network outages, routing problems, straight denial of service attacks (or compromises of the login servers creating mayhem), playing on a train, a plane, or even in a campsite (I actually enjoy camping; gets me to some very strange places, and a laptop is great for the rainy days; usually used for on site photo manipulation of the shots I take out and about).
Online only, for most games, is an artifical single point of failure. It'll mess up a product you paid for with no warning, and possibly irrevocably, all out of your control, with you having absolutely no recourse. That, to me, is an incredibly bad deal. If it's a bad game, then people will be less likely to buy from them again (exacerbated by the online only issues, meaning an even smaller available market, possibly making the difference between surviving as a company and going under). You don't care about the longevity, but you're left with a bad taste.
If it's a great one, then it's not going to be around for the nostalgia trip. When gaming lines are shut down by an active company, then players will be more wary still.
For all the 'big business' groups, thinking that this solves all their piracy woes, they'll be meeting the laws of unintended consequences, where games that don't follow this will have the exposure, thus the following (maybe not immediately, but eventually).. The following generates the sales. The sales bring in the cash, and cash is the lifeblood of a company.
Best analogy of the companies following this route is "Emo". It's very much an "I'll cut myself because I don't like a few people". Not the hard core self harmers who are actually ill, but the ones who'll do it for attention and because they think it'll make them edgy, or gain an advantage, whereas in the long run, it'll likely turn out to be self defeating, pointless and rather embarrassing.
It was a camera malfunction, according to the fanzine.. The fanfic of the time had Avon surviving.. And I think Villa too..
Still got the fanzines from the original run.. Hopefully this time, they won't get a camera malfunction for the last scene in the whole series!
Yes, I understand Capitalism fairly well.
Communism, in its truest sense, is the utopia form of society, being very inclusive. The biggest problem with it is human nature, which pretty much ensures that it'll be subverted and exploited. It's what we should be working towards as a species (until something better can be formulated, which it probably will at some point).
Capitalism is confrontational and warlike, and very exclusive. It's an evolution of the strongest (not necessarily the optimum) under certain constraints, many of which are part of the system itself. It's quite destructive in many ways, doesn't often hit the optimum strategies for the species wide constraints, but is very much in tune with current human behaviour (we're still a pretty primitive, warlike species).
In the wider scale, at the moment, I'd choose Capitalism over Communism, simply because it works, right now. However, I'm hopeful that someday we'll be better than that.
The problem being that many of the people invoking it, and not having a real understanding of it, manage to get other people in court and charged with offenses anyway.
Why do you think Citrix did so well, and the whole application virtualisation stack? RDP and VNC are ok for some things, but they simply lack the power, elegance and utility of network transparency.
Why do so many people pay for Citrix, and VDI?
No. It doesn't.. It disables the 'achievements' section of your connection drops, but saves and gameplay continue unaffected.
It doesn't require always on. If the net cuts off, you don't get the 'awards' function, but hey.. The game works and saves just fine.
Because speed limits are arbitrary figures thought up to cover an arbitrary distance, not tailored to every stretch of road, and not always making sense.
When applied as a "rule of thumb" as to how fast is generally considered reasonable, they're great. Going at, say, twice that limit is silly in most cases (60 in a 30 limit? Most of the time, that's ridiculous.. Except where there's a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere that for some reason is signed as being a 30 limit).
When you apply rigorous enforcement of arbitrary values, you have a system that doesn't make sense for the purported purpose, and when that happens, you have people ignoring it when it's useful, as well as when it's completely barmy.
Someone short changing you in retail is technically theft; if that were enforced in the same way as driving over the speeding limit, everyone in retail on tills would be out of a job in months.
No, it's just kids being kids. I had my tearaway years too (who didn't?).. Looking back, it's a wonder I survived some of them.
Teenagers are neurologically wired to make bad decisions (or reckless ones); part of the learning process that let us survive and adapt as a species (one of those 'reckless' ideas may turn out to have a phenomenal payoff). Unfortunately, some just get themselves killed.
That, alas, is the way the world works. It's not safe. Wrapping kids up in cotton wool simply means they're less able to judge the riskier stuff when they encounter it later in life (when they probably don't have the parental balancing), which leads to far bigger problems.
Parental balance can help, but it doesn't make that side of nature go away.
Not a lot.
The bit that bugs me, is when I was learning to drive, all the advertisements were about how to read the road, how to be safe, how to risk manage the speed you drove at. Also, pedestrians/cyclists were warned that cars were big heavy boxes of death that hurt when they hit you, not sources of revenue when you ended up in hospital. People used to be asked to pay attention to what they were doing.
Now, as a pedestrian etc., if you jump out in front of a car, it's automatically the driver's fault. You claim on insurance, and get a hefty wad of money. If you think this isn't abused, try working in a hospital and listen to some of the people gabble about how the damage they get is going to pay for a nice easy life for them, and how they planned it. And they say it with pride, as if they're clever! It really doesn't enter their heads that jumping in front of a car may kill them, or at least mean they're on expensive surgeries for a lifetime (hey, NHS, or choose your own insurance makes all that free, right?).
A lot of drivers learning these days aren't taught to drive according to the road. They're taught to drive to an arbitrary speed limit. I know a goodly many stretches of road that I'd never drive anywhere _near_ the legal limit, as it's plain not safe... I also drive other stretches at over the speed limit, because it _is_ safe. People that slavishly follow an arbitrary number on a sign are heading for a world of pain.
Speed isn't the problem, it's the other driving practices that usually go with it (texting, having a phone jammed against the ear and trying corners one handed, not paying attention, blind overtaking etc. etc.). If you go after the root causes (hint, it's not usually just speed), then you lower the accidents, reducing the fatalities greatly.
And before you say "if accidents happened to those close to you": My folks were near killed in a head on crash. The other driver was speeding. On the wrong side of the road, and three times over the alcohol limit. Guess which one of that would have made the accident not happen?
My Brother was T-Boned by a car going inside the legal limit (national speed limit) coming out of a blind junction. An element of bad luck there, but the analysis of the other driver was he was just on the alcohol limit, and hadn't taken any notice of signs saying concealed junction, slow and all the other warnings that something dangerous was ahead, likely because he was on his mobile phone (yes he was mid call at the point of accident). That landed him on life support for a month.
Sister, knocked over on a pedestrian crossing, and thrown forward into the path of a car coming the other direction. Inside the legal speed limit, but just not paying attention. It took a defib unit to get her heart beat back, and years of physio to get her walking properly.
The simple fact is that if you don't drive a car, or get in one and never move in it, then you have an almost zero chance of causing death. As soon as it moves, that chance increases. The aim is to prevent accidents, not allow as many as you like, and just say "well, mitigate it by moving everything slowly". Take care of the root cause first.
Wish I could mod that informative.. Learned more about ISBN codes in that post than I have in the preceeding 40 years! :)