121–130 of 347 posts
Battle Chess was a great game. I believe I recall the rook eating the queen as well.
Anyone remember Archon and Archon 2? They were similar although you actually fought a battle for each contact between pieces.
I wonder if they are available from any where these days?
I haven't had the opportunity to try this technique, but I have been waiting ever since for the moment where this might come in handy.
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Another version I've heard of this is with film censorship - apparently when Hitchcock made Psycho , the film censor (I think in the UK - the BBFC) wouldn't give the film a certificate because it was too extreme for the era - too much nudity, too much violence - and suggested a few cuts to just trim back some of the offending shots. Hitchock said of course he would, took the film back, and sat on it for a couple of w…
This works for submissions to the App Store as well.
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There are countless fables about record company executives dropping by the mastering studio to hear the new hit in its finished form. They'd inevitably make some ill-posed request, of the familiar "it needs to pop more!" variety. The wily engineer directs them towards a large and important looking knob, telling them that they are free to dial in as much "pop" as they think the track needs. Of course, they screw up th…
One of the famous tricks in ops consulting is to disconnect the knobs. Shift A likes this oven temperature, shift B likes that oven temperature, etc.
Source: learned during my employee training at The Museum of Flight. http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/boeing-vc-137b-707-12...
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It definitely requires some tact and thought first. The angle I like to focus on is whether something will actively confuse future maintainers. If it's an internal method and the name is odd but not misleading, it's probably not worth raising at a code review or maybe even privately
yeah it's definitely not one for the rooftops with a megaphone anyway.
I hate this story. I think it's important to differentiate between people who have the right knowledge to request a change and those that think they have the right solely because of seniority; but it's also rather disrespectful to 'cheat' and make fake changes just to make the someone happy. No-one deserves to be treated like a 'mark' for our tricks. My experience has been that being honest, polite and knowledgeable…
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There are countless fables about record company executives dropping by the mastering studio to hear the new hit in its finished form. They'd inevitably make some ill-posed request, of the familiar "it needs to pop more!" variety. The wily engineer directs them towards a large and important looking knob, telling them that they are free to dial in as much "pop" as they think the track needs. Of course, they screw up th…
One of the famous tricks in ops consulting is to disconnect the knobs. Shift A likes this oven temperature, shift B likes that oven temperature, etc.
I've always thought the "just remove the duck" story was a condemnation of the artist, not the manager. If your work is so crappy that you know you have to add something even crappier to distract the reviewer, what does that say about your competence? Maybe I'm just jaded from years of reviewing awful code. But if someone put an obvious compiler error into their code in hopes that it would distract me and keep me fro…
I think you missed the spot. "Just remove the duck" is a pattern not an anti-pattern. What it addresses is the urge of some supervisors to ask for some change just to show that they have done a thorough review, while the said change are actually detrimental to the product. > memory leaks, off-by-one errors, and mis-spelled variable names The above don't fall into the review comments that are being avoided as these ar…
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Not a huge Steve Jobs fan, but I had a professor who had worked as a designer under Steve Jobs and tried something similar. Steve insisted that a new mouse needed to be just a fraction of a millimetre slimmer so a person's palm was lower and closer to the work surface. They figured he was being an unreasonable "delicate genius" and returned a few days later with the identical mouse and claimed they had reworked it to…
I think this anecdote might help explain Jobs's success. There is a tendency when one is running or developing a product to convince yourself that your efforts are producing a genuinely good product that your customers will like. Frequently that isn't true, and the product is rightly trashed by the outsiders. The thing is, the people on the inside would have trashed it too if they had not been insiders. Jobs seems to…