This is a good point. We have ideas in the pipeline for this issue as well. They either involve some sort of bounty-based scheme (where managers can set up bounties for specific tasks - usually the hard ones) or reasessing the point value of actions based on the "tough nut to crack" factor (time since inception of the issue times priority, or something along those lines).

All in all, the important part is that gamification is a quantum leap in the tools you have available for metering and tracking work (compared to, say, hours spent on X). There is still lots to be discovered and built in this direction, and we are trying to figure it out.

Not really. Management needs measuring and gamification is a great form of it, with other good side-effects. It can be done poorly, like any incentive system, but I think there is real value in the toolset.

Unlike an Internet forum, you can easily fix some issues with real life discipline. If a tech is unethically gambling the system you can address him directly. It's real life fraud, not comment spam.

My people are in a hurry? How would you possibly know that?

Gamification is a tool, like salary, bonuses, good chairs, free meals, hammers and screwdrivers. You can use them for whatever they want. I know the "combo" quests are amusing and give out nice bragging rights with the other guys in our company. Customers are liking it as well. If you come from a "fail the quest and be fired" attitude then obviously it turns into a mindless drone thing, but that is not gamification's fault, it's the managers'.

From this point of view, the gamification functionalities are a form of measurement that is good in the ways I described above (easy to understand and tune, transparent, easy to audit). You can then use it to support any type of money compensation scheme you like. In the end it comes down to a management decision, we just build a software product.

Or you can actually have fun using it. I know we have extra fun with our own support tracker in the office since this was implemented. Continuous integration systems (Hudson/Jenkins) have had this for a while and developers love it. And I don't think anyone ever got a pay discount for breaking a build. Monetary incentives are not the final answer to everything. Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards" has some interesting points on the subject.

We don't sell support services, we build a helpdesk product that companies buy and use to provide support services. We also use our own support tool to support our customers, obviously.

I don't mind a plug if it's pertinent and relevant. The fact is I probably have spent more time thinking about gamification than 99% of the people reading this thread, and therefore have some insight to share. I provided a link in case someone needs more information or wants to see the actual implementation :)

Customer satisfaction is *the* metric for a customer support service. Even for "internal customers" (people inside your company) it's a big deal. You won't get fired for a bad rating, and if the customer is an asshole this can be traced back and reviewed by a coordinator/supervisor by tracking where your points came from (there is a history log of everything).

It sounds like you are coming from a "tech vs. the rest" type of experience. In most non technology companies, tech is service for the rest, so a change of mindset is in order.

In the end, it's about people. Tools are just supposed to get all non-people problems out of your way (such as communication, tracking, measurement, etc).

I get you mean it as a joke, but this is not possible, any decent system only allows feedback after the issue is closed.

The trick is in closing the feedback loop. Not all projects are software projects, where quality is highly subjective and unmeasurable. At InvGate we introduced earlier this year a set of tools to bring gamification to the helpdesk.

If your system can measure the actual quality of the work (which is possible in IT/customer support environments by gathering feedback from requesters) then you can actually have an incentive system that works.

Bad system:
* 10 points for solving a ticket
* 1 point por replying to a ticket
* 4 points for chipping into another tech's tickets (allegedly to help out)
* -20 points for reopened ticket
* -100 points for SLA missed

If you ever worked in this type of environment, you can already see the incentives pushing for quick, bad replies to customers in your tickets and everyone else's, and new requests filed instead of reopening old ones.

But what about this?

* 1 point for solving a ticket
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets
* -100 points for SLA missed
* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row
* 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour

It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a "Knowledge Week" quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance):
* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves

There other significant side effects to a gamification setup in this situation:

* You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X
* Non-geek helpdesk or customer support admins can tune incentives themselves (an earlier approach with a "black box" combined metric resulted in questions about how it's calculated, and why it's doing things that you don't expect)
* Unlike the case mentioned above, gamification-based metrics are transparent. Everyone can understand what's going on with a score counter that pops up when you perform actions.
* It even has a "ka-ching" sound effect when you get points!

Chrome for mostly everything, and Firefox to access intranet sites with self-signed SSL certificates because to this day and age I can't tell Chromium on Linux to accept a friggin' self-signed certificate and stop prompting me every single time I access the site. No, adding the certificate to my trusted list at the OS level doesn't work.

And what if I happen to be a visiting contractor, and I have an emergency while on the grounds, without a guard in line of sight? What if I'm driving by and break down right in front, and the prison microcell is more powerful than ATT's nearest tower?

Then the guards would be alerted to your activities and that "no guard in sight" situation would change. Problem solved.

Anyway, why would they let you into a prison as a contractor with restricted items, unguarded?

Option C is included in B. Furthermore, you failed to state which are the genes that do not have to be hashed.

Logic dictates that either option A or B must be true, with bizarre examples using genetics in strange ways, such as yours included in option B.

I guess so.

There probably is some advantage of using an amplifier in that role, but I'm just to green to know.

That's what I meant.

If you used a solar cell as a light sensor, it'll deliver just a few milliwatts that you'd have to amplify anyway.
With this technology, you could place one of these cells on top of an amplifier, and apply power to the whole thing. It would then give you a reading of ambient light in a more reasonable range (say from 0V to V+), straight from the chip.

This could be useful as a one chip light sensor, say for a digital camera.

It would simplify light sensing equipment a lot, leading to very low prices.

Light sensor with built in amplifier.

Because there are dishes on the ground perfectly capable of doing that job that don't cost nearly as much.

Actually, there are not many antennas bigger than that one. It is roughly the size of one of these puppies. The only bigger antenna I know of would be the one at the Arecibo observatory.

On the other hand, you're probably right, as the space agencies would now use arrays of little antennas to look out into space.

(That monster must be sensitive as hell, those 70 metre antennas have been used to communicate with far away probes that had problems with their high gain antennas, imagine the sensitivity of one of those just 20000 KM away)