Do companies never know how much they suck?

[Crissa]

No really, do companies never realize how much they suck? Do they bother ever looking outside the box?

For instance, the Gleemax people... They had a huge sign at GDC saying how they were 'INDEPENDENT' of any game company. And yet, there, paid by their companies to staff their booth are developers for Wizards, Hasbro, Microsoft, etc.

Today I get an invite for web-browser 3-D games. I sign in, yay! ...And guess what? Their games only work on Windows Vista. They can work in Firefox... But who cares? They only work on Vista! That kinda makes it pointless to even be in a browser at that point. Worse, you can't log in unless you're on Vista because you need Vista to play the game, and it redirects you to the forums, which then redirect you to the login page - because you aren't logged in.

Stupid, stupid.

-Crissa

[Count Arioch the 28th]

That sounds like a well thought out system.

[SunTzuWarmaster]

The one that keeps bothering me is Vuze. Vuze is a mandatory attachment (as far as I can tell) for P2P networking via torrents that comes built in with Azureus. Azureus is open source and works on any platform. Vuze, however, has about a 1/5 chance on not letting you download something VIA TORRENT because "it is not compatible with your operating system." I run linux, the OS that this program was built for... Also, since when do torrents have any operating system dependency?

[Fwib]

Today I get an invite for web-browser 3-D games. I sign in, yay! ...And guess what? Their games only work on Windows Vista. They can work in Firefox... But who cares? They only work on Vista! That kinda makes it pointless to even be in a browser at that point. Worse, you can't log in unless you're on Vista because you need Vista to play the game, and it redirects you to the forums, which then redirect you to the login page - because you aren't logged in.

Stupid, stupid.

-Crissa

What happens when you use something like User Agent Switcher to pretend to be on Vista with IE?

[SunTzuWarmaster]

I haven't really messed with it, but as far as I know you have to browse Vuze through the not-web-browser that they developed. It is built into the program itself. Since it's linux, I imagine that there is some obscure config flag in the code I could just alter, but the whole system is rather stupid.

[Josh_Kablack]

I currently work for the Univ of Pgh's survey research department, conducting opinion polls and recruitments of controls for various medical studies.

For the opinion polls we use primarily random digit dialing*, so I honestly don't know who I'm calling until they pick up, and frequently I reach various business numbers on polls where we want to speak solely to household members. In such cases, the procedure is to verify the number with the person on the other end and then remove it from our calling list for that poll. Some businesses are better about this than others - sometimes people are resentful of the intrusion on their time, sometimes people are just baffled to get a call outside their usual experience, sometimes people are unaware of all the rollover numbers that ring into the phone they answer. But the absolute worst business to get, because they never know their number and will transfer you twice before someone even listens to the "I just need to verify this number so I can remove it from our list" script, and then that person will know neither the number you originally dialed nor their own direct line is VERIZON - the Phone Company.