Comment Re:Reddit is down because of this (Score 1) 247
I see what you did there.
Hey, feels just like Reddit!
I see what you did there.
Hey, feels just like Reddit!
I was brought into my current job about eight years ago, ostensibly to bring PM and SDLC process to the wild west of application development in my department. The mainframers wanted nothing to do with process improvement, saying they had everything under control. The client/server and web folks gave me the "we're different, old rules don't apply" argument. I asked around, looked through old documentation, anything to get a feel for where this group was at and what they'd done. After about six weeks, I decided it was basically a green field and brought in your run-of-the-mill PMI-style project mgmt and basic SDLC. Nothing fancy, and pretty stripped down since most projects were in the $50K-$150K range.
Fast forward to this year. Management makes a sweet offer for early retirees, and they take the bait. In droves. One of the retirees drops a folder off on my desk as she's headed out the door. It says, "Blast from the past...thought you might enjoy this." It was a fairly complete PM and SDLC definition, from two years before I'd arrived. No one (including the manager who had hired me and given me the task) had offered this to me before, even though that manager's name was on the approvers list.
Now I'm not sure this was strictly age-ism, but might this problem be more properly defined as a "green-field" syndrome? That is, that people would rather bump into the same problem than have to listen to someone else who's already been there?
One of the emails under scrutiny, written by Phil Jones, the centre's director, in 1999, reads: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." Prof Jones has insisted that he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do", rather than to indicate deception. He has denied manipulating data. Another scientist whose name appears in the documents accused the hackers of attempting to undermine the drive for a global consensus at next month's Copenhagen summit. Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research accused climate change sceptics of cherry-picking the documents and taking them out of context.
I suppose a calculation of the margin of error would be needed to verify the data is accurate and not cherry picked."
Depends, many people enjoy doing crazy jumps and moves and fighting monsters and stuff (yes, that includes Mario games), which they couldn't perform when they would be wearing a a mo-cap suit and have perfect 1:1 mapping. Abstraction helps you do stuff you couldn't do in reality, complete lack of abstractions just puts you back into reality, which is not where most people want to be when they think about games.
To some extent, I think that's my point, too. But wouldn't you agree that there are many cases where pointing at the screen or moving the controller in space is a more effective abstraction? The controlled level of physicality in Wii games is different and very enjoyable for non-gamers.
And yet I have never seen such huge obtrusive tutorial texts as in Wii games on any other console. Those games sure have to explain a hell of a lot of stuff for their "intuitive interaction".
As a recovering 133t gamer, I sure don't need those, but if they help my wife, nieces, and kids catch up, then that's fine. It's not all about me anymore.
Really? How come third party developers largely ignore the Wii and focus on Xbox360 and PS3 instead?
That's a pretty subjective point.
Bottom line - the Wii is definitely made for a different class of gamer. Hardcore gamers are generally not going to understand the point of it.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker