Ah, but in both Fable and Jade Empire you had to hold the thumbstick in one direction for long periods of time to get anywhere. That is a gameplay issue and it is boring. With the scrolls Jade Empire made the walk in a bit more interesting for some, but the walk out was sheer boredom. There was no possibility of finding random items of possible interest strewn in your path, just a long walk back the way you came, interrupted by the occasional resetting of lower level monsters you had already beaten. In tabletop RPGs this is smoothed over by a slick GM who skips over uneventful sequences. Those CRPGs games should have had an interactive map to pull you to checkpoints where you've already been- call up the map, select the checkpoint with the D-pad or stick, then push a button and go there.
"Gameplay innovations" is a scary phrase that (at least for me) conjures up one-off navigation methods and confusing action sequences. What I've just described is hardly an innovation but it would have made the game so much better (except for masochists). Both games already implemented the ability to jump, just increase the number referring to the distance jumped, run the jump, then hide the map screen to show you in the new location.
I felt bad about doing "evil" in Jade Empire too, and as a result I missed half the story. I got to see it in Fable, where evil was kinda campy. I feel that the problem is that we've been putting up with subpar gameplay for so long in RPGs that we are conditioned to expect it, and as a result the industry continues to produce to our expectations. In view of that, how can we possibly blame the industry?
Personally, things like this are why I pay for damned near everything with a credit card. I've never had to resort to it, but if it comes down to it, you call your card, tell them what's up, and they investigate. If this guy is right, and the telco has no evidence whatsoever of a contract, they don't get paid.
Listen, I tried this once, the credit card company refused to go to bat for me. I bought a pair of running pants from the mall and they fell apart after only being worn twice. When I disputed the charges the credit card company let them go through and then told me they couldn't do anything about it. The merchant refused to take them back, saying only the manager was authorized to give refunds and that he somehow managed the store from another dimension where he couldn't be contacted.
Has anyone had any luck with disputing charges by credit card?
I don't believe a bit of it. What geek hates to go to class, especially when you've got the best gadget of all, a robot? "So I could stay home", yeah right you charlatan.
I might be convinced if he reports that the robot stood in for him during a go with the missus so he could recompile Gentoo.
let's reserve judgement untill we start seeing more material
Ok, how's this? Lucy Lawless thinks Goldmoon is a Native American. Oh and she's doing Xena's voice for Goldmoon. Thanks for turning my wet dreams into nightmares, Hollywood. Why don't you see if you can fark up Woodstock next oh wait nvrmnd
Here is how I envision the system working. If there is an incident in school, we just assume that the smart kids were behaving apropriately. True or False: Stalin was smart.
In school it is the big kids who rule, in the 'real' world the rich rule. In my experience the big kids had to watch their Ps and Qs more because they were considered more of a threat. The real rulers were the kids with rich parents who had influence on the school board. Good luck changing that.
Why not set up our schools so that the individuals who win are the most useful? They're not our schools, they belong to the government. The government sees high fliers as a necessary evil, useful only as long as they are loyal. Put any gifted person in a regular reading group (or government job) and watch them stultify faster than you can wave goodbye to "your" tax dollars.
Take that tinfoil off your head and come along with us. Oh and bring that old camera, we need you to do some filming in, ah, well, somewhere in the Caribbean.
It's sad that there are such a rare few number of games that do a good combination of narrative and interaction.
The porn method began as a way to keep the player interested during embarrassingly long data loads. Used to throw up a long blurb of text, then began loading the next level while the player read the text. Put a few big words in there and you can keep em busy until the stage loaded. Someone thought it was a main feature rather than an embarrassment and declared that the text should scroll, then have an audio clip, then have a CGI video clip, then have a true video clip, and so on. They do it because seeing an entertaining ending to a stage or a game is supposed to be gratifying. They don't realize that if they botch the ending, we'll like it about as much as any movie with Rob Schneider in it. When you finished the Atari 2600 game Adventure, the screen background flashed colors as the buttons ceased to work, and that was how you knew you had finally won. Nobody tried to win an Academy award with the ending in those days. And it was enough. The era of big budget games has caused producers to compose pile after steaming pile of this sort of thing as some sort of industry resume builder. The only thing worse would be JPGs of the producer popping up midgame and saying "Frosty!" when you get your ass handed to you. Oh wait.
Any influence must come from lobbying the entity running the servers. The griefer you jack today might be the hall monitor tomorrow (or yesterday, or 30 secs from now). Perhaps a bunch of geewhiz posts will follow lauding the joys of community self-government in MMO. Nevertheless, all you'll create is a bunch of lobbyists. As for Darniaq's argument... The thrill of exploring a open-ended world in order to make real-world financial gain must be tempered by the knowledge that if someone at the top decides they don't like you, out you go with all you've worked for. At least when you're fired from a real job they have trouble taking what you earned six months ago. But that's the default experience when your account gets stuffed because you called the wrong person a tool by accident.
You look for broad-coverage employees?
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
but by and large it seemed like most of these applicants got very little broad-coverage training in the real IT world, but instead were all pidgeon-holed into little isolated sub-sections of IT training and knowledge without being able to be immediately competant at the "big picture"
Most of the job listings I have encountered seem to call for specialists. They read like this. The listing is obviously the resume of the guy who just left. So tell us, is this sort of listing a bluff? Do all managers really want broad-coverage people and figure asking for the opposite is the best way to get them? Or are you the only one who wants broad-coverage staff?
are execmt from includiung laptops It is not alarming the people occasionally accdentally disseminate Its even permissible... that it's personell records govenrment governemnt
Hmm. Your comment encryption scheme is intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Perhaps you could also help me with 'encrypting' some email I wish to send regarding 'performance-enhancing' drugs.
Hmm, the European Court of Justice. Aren't their laws enforced by the Justice Friends? All I'm saying is please don't send Marvin, Wendy and Wonderdog this time. Or Aquaman.
Does the name really matter? If you ask the average joe you'll find that most people just call it "the Nintendo". The company only makes one console at a time. Only pedants and supergeeks with Nintendo consoles from multiple generations need to call it "The Wii". Nintendo could call it the Happyscrappy Mindfuck Assclown Console System and it wouldn't change a thing for me. I still call it 'The Nintendo'. I always have and I always will.
I can't believe these companies think I'm going to evidence any sort of loyalty to their brand when it comes to the Internet. When I want to buy one gross of used underpants, I don't care which infomediary points me to the merchant. This is good for eBay I guess, but it looks like a tradeoff for Yahoo. It's great for Google because now when I google for "one gross used underpants" I'll get more results. Soon I'll be able to discriminate between Fruit of the Loom and BVDs. And then... something. And THEN- profit!
I read multiple news sources, even the same story... While I am reading I am thinking critically, asking myself questions... Often enough, by reading carefully from multiple sources, I can piece together the whole picture.
In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used?
At first this seems like an intelligent question, but it avoids the real issue. Listen, no one held a gun to your head and made you visit a website with an obscenity on it. All they did was make something world-readable. You voluntarily connected to the unsecure Internet network, You navigated to the site in question, You clicked on the link you had never clicked on before knowing not what to expect, You scrolled down, and Then you saw the obscenity. Without getting into the usual bad analogies that get upmods but fail to move discussion forward, let me ask you, if you had done all this and were genuinely offended, which solution is most reasonable: "A) don't visit that link or site or network again" or "B) hire an expensive attorney, pay a bunch of money in court costs, request an injunction, and then repeat the entire process next week when mirrors of the site you shut down pop up all over the net". And any judge with half a brain knows darn well what's really going on when people behave unreasonably in this fashion. Someone is trying to use criminal proceedings for personal gain or to settle a personal score. And he might go along with it. But in the process the plaintiff must state his given name for the record, so now the entire world knows exactly what kind of man plaintiff John Q Pantiesinabunch really is. Once you know that, you can figure out how to handle him.
When I fill out my IRS tax form, I am required to put my occupation and the amount I made. I believe the government keeps track of this sort of thing at the Bureau of Labor. I used their webform to select all computer and mathematical occupation numbers for all industries and generated an Excel spreadsheet. The data is about a year old. Then it was easy to figure the trend using a little arithmetic. According to my calculations the US gains around 50000 new tech jobs every six months. I suppose it's possible that the ACM study might include investigating an outsourcing of illegal tech occupations to other countries, which wouldn't be reported to the IRS, but that's rather farfetched.
Major premise: Management has already fscked up everything they could get their hands on. Minor premise: Linux is something management could get their hands on. Conclusion: If management learns about Linux, they'll break, co-opt, nerf, and generally screw with it in such a way that you'll be made miserable. Solution: Publicly opine that Linux is a passing fad while secretly doing all your best work thereon, including your private projects that keep you productive and employably mobile. But most of all, support the anti-Linux VP who's getting the kickbacks from Microsoft and join him in snorting coke off the bums of hookers in the champagne-filled jacuzzi.
In a single day, most of the people you know encounter more than one electronic device that can handle email/calendar/group messaging. Most of the time the two or more devices are not the same. Most of those devices are connected to a network of some sort. Think about this for a minute. There is webmail, there are web calendars, there is web group messaging. What can an installed client do that cannot be done via browser? That's worth the hassle? Why would you want to dichk around with installing anything when you can open a browser window and be connected in seconds? Why learn a gratuitiously different interface when you can do your work using common web widgets you already know?
I believe this concept is publicly resisted by SlashDotters but privately embraced by them. I believe it's because a fair amount of geeks make their living cleaning up after Outlook and Exchange. It's the elephant in the comments that no one wants to talk about, but I feel it needs to be discussed. Slashdot geeks still like to talk about freedom, don't they?
The new name combined with this editorial may serve to detect whether the forced namechange was meanspirited or not. If the GM had an axe to grind and he read this editorial, he might be pleased. Then all he has to do is wait a week or so until you have reestablished all your old chat connections. Then he just does what he did before. Then repeat until you depart the game in disgust. Sure it's against the rules, but can you prove it wasn't a glitch? Didn't you indemnify Blizzard from glitches in your account agreement?
Hell hath no fury like a bitter geek. How do you know this isn't all about some moderation gripe from years past?
You've posted about this before. Is it possible that school is not about learning but about learning HOW to learn? When I graduated I didn't jump for joy because the learning would stop but because it would finally start. All that time I spent memorizing multiplication tables, spelling words only an English teacher would know, and writing papers that would be barely read by one disinterested person-- it doesn't make any sense apart from the notion that it's supposed to teach me how to learn noninstinctive behaviour. I'm surprised you have 34 well behaved students, too bad you can't hire them part time after school to build you a bass boat or something. 34 people with at least 8 years of education under their belts spending the best hours of the day in a classroom learning the dates when Boss Tweed was born and died-- what a waste of potential. Even for the types who find that fun-- you know they just want approval.
I dare you to mix it up a little. Set up a blog and make each student post a 40-line summary of a historic event they learned that day, while it's still fresh. One student a day. Login required, and all submissions become your property (hey if lycos can do it so can you). Open book, allow them to use other sources, and allow them to plaigiarize if they weren't paying attention, as long as turnitin.com fails to detect it. Grade that post, then open it up for comment by peers-- useful comments you appreciate get a grade or admin perk from you. (I advocate giving commenters a 10 minute hall pass to goof off but that's just me. No I'm not that fat kid in the second row. With the pocket protector.) After a student gets their grade back, vet the post, spellcheck, use any insightful comments, forward any insults to a joke site, and pick the key sentence for use as a fill-in-the-blank question on the exam. You just graded 1 quiz and he just wrote one 34th of the exam for you.
At the end of the semester or year, gather all the posts, improve them with any insightful comments, edit them for content, run them through spell and grammar check, and you've got a new resource. After a year or two it will be sufficiently improved to the point where you can begin to use it. You can put it on the web to increase your respect in the eyes of other high school historians, you can sell it to a third party (who will probably sell it to children and collegians trying to cheat in other schools, but hey you don't know that), you can use it as part of the material next year and maybe help you to cut loose an inadequate textbook, you can print a single copy and donate it to a needy school so they can bind it for use as a textbook, you can improve wikipedia with some of the content... All you have to do is what you are already doing. Use what you're already doing! If there's some rule that doesn't make sense to your java-usin' analytical mind (for example: "5 pages, double spaced, 12 point Courier New-- hmm this does not equal Knowledge") then replace that rule with something useful that you and your students can feel good about. And for heaven's sake don't ask permission, the higher ups will just say no so they don't have to think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
he steals my bandwidth
shares child porn and gangsta rap
so I key his car
Ah, but in both Fable and Jade Empire you had to hold the thumbstick in one direction for long periods of time to get anywhere. That is a gameplay issue and it is boring. With the scrolls Jade Empire made the walk in a bit more interesting for some, but the walk out was sheer boredom. There was no possibility of finding random items of possible interest strewn in your path, just a long walk back the way you came, interrupted by the occasional resetting of lower level monsters you had already beaten. In tabletop RPGs this is smoothed over by a slick GM who skips over uneventful sequences. Those CRPGs games should have had an interactive map to pull you to checkpoints where you've already been- call up the map, select the checkpoint with the D-pad or stick, then push a button and go there.
"Gameplay innovations" is a scary phrase that (at least for me) conjures up one-off navigation methods and confusing action sequences. What I've just described is hardly an innovation but it would have made the game so much better (except for masochists). Both games already implemented the ability to jump, just increase the number referring to the distance jumped, run the jump, then hide the map screen to show you in the new location.
I felt bad about doing "evil" in Jade Empire too, and as a result I missed half the story. I got to see it in Fable, where evil was kinda campy. I feel that the problem is that we've been putting up with subpar gameplay for so long in RPGs that we are conditioned to expect it, and as a result the industry continues to produce to our expectations. In view of that, how can we possibly blame the industry?
Personally, things like this are why I pay for damned near everything with a credit card. I've never had to resort to it, but if it comes down to it, you call your card, tell them what's up, and they investigate. If this guy is right, and the telco has no evidence whatsoever of a contract, they don't get paid.
Listen, I tried this once, the credit card company refused to go to bat for me. I bought a pair of running pants from the mall and they fell apart after only being worn twice. When I disputed the charges the credit card company let them go through and then told me they couldn't do anything about it. The merchant refused to take them back, saying only the manager was authorized to give refunds and that he somehow managed the store from another dimension where he couldn't be contacted.
Has anyone had any luck with disputing charges by credit card?
I don't believe a bit of it. What geek hates to go to class, especially when you've got the best gadget of all, a robot? "So I could stay home", yeah right you charlatan.
I might be convinced if he reports that the robot stood in for him during a go with the missus so he could recompile Gentoo.
let's reserve judgement untill we start seeing more material
Ok, how's this? Lucy Lawless thinks Goldmoon is a Native American. Oh and she's doing Xena's voice for Goldmoon. Thanks for turning my wet dreams into nightmares, Hollywood. Why don't you see if you can fark up Woodstock next oh wait nvrmnd
Here is how I envision the system working. If there is an incident in school, we just assume that the smart kids were behaving apropriately.
True or False: Stalin was smart.
In school it is the big kids who rule, in the 'real' world the rich rule.
In my experience the big kids had to watch their Ps and Qs more because they were considered more of a threat. The real rulers were the kids with rich parents who had influence on the school board. Good luck changing that.
Why not set up our schools so that the individuals who win are the most useful?
They're not our schools, they belong to the government. The government sees high fliers as a necessary evil, useful only as long as they are loyal. Put any gifted person in a regular reading group (or government job) and watch them stultify faster than you can wave goodbye to "your" tax dollars.
Take that tinfoil off your head and come along with us. Oh and bring that old camera, we need you to do some filming in, ah, well, somewhere in the Caribbean.
It's sad that there are such a rare few number of games that do a good combination of narrative and interaction.
The porn method began as a way to keep the player interested during embarrassingly long data loads. Used to throw up a long blurb of text, then began loading the next level while the player read the text. Put a few big words in there and you can keep em busy until the stage loaded. Someone thought it was a main feature rather than an embarrassment and declared that the text should scroll, then have an audio clip, then have a CGI video clip, then have a true video clip, and so on. They do it because seeing an entertaining ending to a stage or a game is supposed to be gratifying. They don't realize that if they botch the ending, we'll like it about as much as any movie with Rob Schneider in it. When you finished the Atari 2600 game Adventure, the screen background flashed colors as the buttons ceased to work, and that was how you knew you had finally won. Nobody tried to win an Academy award with the ending in those days. And it was enough. The era of big budget games has caused producers to compose pile after steaming pile of this sort of thing as some sort of industry resume builder. The only thing worse would be JPGs of the producer popping up midgame and saying "Frosty!" when you get your ass handed to you. Oh wait.
Any influence must come from lobbying the entity running the servers. The griefer you jack today might be the hall monitor tomorrow (or yesterday, or 30 secs from now). Perhaps a bunch of geewhiz posts will follow lauding the joys of community self-government in MMO. Nevertheless, all you'll create is a bunch of lobbyists. As for Darniaq's argument... The thrill of exploring a open-ended world in order to make real-world financial gain must be tempered by the knowledge that if someone at the top decides they don't like you, out you go with all you've worked for. At least when you're fired from a real job they have trouble taking what you earned six months ago. But that's the default experience when your account gets stuffed because you called the wrong person a tool by accident.
but by and large it seemed like most of these applicants got very little broad-coverage training in the real IT world, but instead were all pidgeon-holed into little isolated sub-sections of IT training and knowledge without being able to be immediately competant at the "big picture"
Most of the job listings I have encountered seem to call for specialists. They read like this. The listing is obviously the resume of the guy who just left. So tell us, is this sort of listing a bluff? Do all managers really want broad-coverage people and figure asking for the opposite is the best way to get them? Or are you the only one who wants broad-coverage staff?
are execmt from ... that it's personell records
includiung laptops
It is not alarming the people occasionally accdentally disseminate
Its even permissible
govenrment
governemnt
Hmm. Your comment encryption scheme is intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Perhaps you could also help me with 'encrypting' some email I wish to send regarding 'performance-enhancing' drugs.
Hmm, the European Court of Justice. Aren't their laws enforced by the Justice Friends? All I'm saying is please don't send Marvin, Wendy and Wonderdog this time. Or Aquaman.
Does the name really matter? If you ask the average joe you'll find that most people just call it "the Nintendo". The company only makes one console at a time. Only pedants and supergeeks with Nintendo consoles from multiple generations need to call it "The Wii". Nintendo could call it the Happyscrappy Mindfuck Assclown Console System and it wouldn't change a thing for me. I still call it 'The Nintendo'. I always have and I always will.
I can't believe these companies think I'm going to evidence any sort of loyalty to their brand when it comes to the Internet. When I want to buy one gross of used underpants, I don't care which infomediary points me to the merchant. This is good for eBay I guess, but it looks like a tradeoff for Yahoo. It's great for Google because now when I google for "one gross used underpants" I'll get more results. Soon I'll be able to discriminate between Fruit of the Loom and BVDs. And then... something. And THEN- profit!
I read multiple news sources, even the same story ... While I am reading I am thinking critically, asking myself questions... Often enough, by reading carefully from multiple sources, I can piece together the whole picture.
What are you doing on Slashdot? I cast thee out!
In the age of the Internet, a new issue has been raised - if something considered free speech in New York is accessible in Alabama, where it's considered obscene, what standard should be used?
At first this seems like an intelligent question, but it avoids the real issue. Listen, no one held a gun to your head and made you visit a website with an obscenity on it. All they did was make something world-readable. You voluntarily connected to the unsecure Internet network, You navigated to the site in question, You clicked on the link you had never clicked on before knowing not what to expect, You scrolled down, and Then you saw the obscenity. Without getting into the usual bad analogies that get upmods but fail to move discussion forward, let me ask you, if you had done all this and were genuinely offended, which solution is most reasonable: "A) don't visit that link or site or network again" or "B) hire an expensive attorney, pay a bunch of money in court costs, request an injunction, and then repeat the entire process next week when mirrors of the site you shut down pop up all over the net". And any judge with half a brain knows darn well what's really going on when people behave unreasonably in this fashion. Someone is trying to use criminal proceedings for personal gain or to settle a personal score. And he might go along with it. But in the process the plaintiff must state his given name for the record, so now the entire world knows exactly what kind of man plaintiff John Q Pantiesinabunch really is. Once you know that, you can figure out how to handle him.
This hasn't worked for me. How did you get them to fulfill their agreement?
When I fill out my IRS tax form, I am required to put my occupation and the amount I made. I believe the government keeps track of this sort of thing at the Bureau of Labor. I used their webform to select all computer and mathematical occupation numbers for all industries and generated an Excel spreadsheet. The data is about a year old. Then it was easy to figure the trend using a little arithmetic. According to my calculations the US gains around 50000 new tech jobs every six months. I suppose it's possible that the ACM study might include investigating an outsourcing of illegal tech occupations to other countries, which wouldn't be reported to the IRS, but that's rather farfetched.
Major premise: Management has already fscked up everything they could get their hands on.
Minor premise: Linux is something management could get their hands on.
Conclusion: If management learns about Linux, they'll break, co-opt, nerf, and generally screw with it in such a way that you'll be made miserable.
Solution: Publicly opine that Linux is a passing fad while secretly doing all your best work thereon, including your private projects that keep you productive and employably mobile. But most of all, support the anti-Linux VP who's getting the kickbacks from Microsoft and join him in snorting coke off the bums of hookers in the champagne-filled jacuzzi.
Coming Soon: the Larry Ellison Fund for Needy CEOs
In a single day, most of the people you know encounter more than one electronic device that can handle email/calendar/group messaging. Most of the time the two or more devices are not the same. Most of those devices are connected to a network of some sort. Think about this for a minute. There is webmail, there are web calendars, there is web group messaging. What can an installed client do that cannot be done via browser? That's worth the hassle? Why would you want to dichk around with installing anything when you can open a browser window and be connected in seconds? Why learn a gratuitiously different interface when you can do your work using common web widgets you already know?
I believe this concept is publicly resisted by SlashDotters but privately embraced by them. I believe it's because a fair amount of geeks make their living cleaning up after Outlook and Exchange. It's the elephant in the comments that no one wants to talk about, but I feel it needs to be discussed. Slashdot geeks still like to talk about freedom, don't they?
Adam answered some of these questions already in another interview. I did not see it mentioned in this discussion, so here:
part 1
part 2
The new name combined with this editorial may serve to detect whether the forced namechange was meanspirited or not. If the GM had an axe to grind and he read this editorial, he might be pleased. Then all he has to do is wait a week or so until you have reestablished all your old chat connections. Then he just does what he did before. Then repeat until you depart the game in disgust. Sure it's against the rules, but can you prove it wasn't a glitch? Didn't you indemnify Blizzard from glitches in your account agreement?
Hell hath no fury like a bitter geek. How do you know this isn't all about some moderation gripe from years past?
In Capitalist Amerika, you fire off flamemail.
In Soviet Russia, flamemail fires you!
You've posted about this before. Is it possible that school is not about learning but about learning HOW to learn? When I graduated I didn't jump for joy because the learning would stop but because it would finally start. All that time I spent memorizing multiplication tables, spelling words only an English teacher would know, and writing papers that would be barely read by one disinterested person-- it doesn't make any sense apart from the notion that it's supposed to teach me how to learn noninstinctive behaviour. I'm surprised you have 34 well behaved students, too bad you can't hire them part time after school to build you a bass boat or something. 34 people with at least 8 years of education under their belts spending the best hours of the day in a classroom learning the dates when Boss Tweed was born and died-- what a waste of potential. Even for the types who find that fun-- you know they just want approval.
I dare you to mix it up a little. Set up a blog and make each student post a 40-line summary of a historic event they learned that day, while it's still fresh. One student a day. Login required, and all submissions become your property (hey if lycos can do it so can you). Open book, allow them to use other sources, and allow them to plaigiarize if they weren't paying attention, as long as turnitin.com fails to detect it. Grade that post, then open it up for comment by peers-- useful comments you appreciate get a grade or admin perk from you. (I advocate giving commenters a 10 minute hall pass to goof off but that's just me. No I'm not that fat kid in the second row. With the pocket protector.) After a student gets their grade back, vet the post, spellcheck, use any insightful comments, forward any insults to a joke site, and pick the key sentence for use as a fill-in-the-blank question on the exam. You just graded 1 quiz and he just wrote one 34th of the exam for you.
At the end of the semester or year, gather all the posts, improve them with any insightful comments, edit them for content, run them through spell and grammar check, and you've got a new resource. After a year or two it will be sufficiently improved to the point where you can begin to use it. You can put it on the web to increase your respect in the eyes of other high school historians, you can sell it to a third party (who will probably sell it to children and collegians trying to cheat in other schools, but hey you don't know that), you can use it as part of the material next year and maybe help you to cut loose an inadequate textbook, you can print a single copy and donate it to a needy school so they can bind it for use as a textbook, you can improve wikipedia with some of the content... All you have to do is what you are already doing. Use what you're already doing! If there's some rule that doesn't make sense to your java-usin' analytical mind (for example: "5 pages, double spaced, 12 point Courier New-- hmm this does not equal Knowledge") then replace that rule with something useful that you and your students can feel good about. And for heaven's sake don't ask permission, the higher ups will just say no so they don't have to think about it.