Exactly. I suspect this is why the swine flu in the US has been so much milder than the one in Mexico. The one killing people in Mexico is too deadly - it kills its hosts before they can pass it around. And perhaps also too severe for the hosts to stupidly go to work, the movies, etc. and pass it around for a few days before dying.
So the worst version of the virus has died off (hopefully) while the milder one keeps getting passed around.
What's interesting is that no one is dying outside of Mexico. Outside of tawdry racist comments, why would this be the case? Why is the flu so mild outside of Mexico?
The answer is, I think, Evolution. We tend to think of these viruses as evil killers. But does it benefit the flu to kill its hosts? It doesn't. I benefits most when the host stays alive, sneezing and coughing, spreading the flu.
So why did the deadly flu only kill people in Mexico? Because it was too severe. It killed off all of its hosts. Only a milder form lasted long enough to travel outside of Mexico.
That's my optimistic project so far, anyhow. Let's hope thats the case ^_^
A private citizen recording images or pictures, sure. But you're basically suggesting that every image and video recorded by the police, doctors, hospitals, and so on is "destined" to be public domain. Same for corporate documents, non-disclosure agreements, and every private document in existence.
That's an absurd approach. If someone violates the law or the rules of their job, they should be held accountable for it.
This attitude won't last forever. Arguably, it's already over. Verizon has made a lot of concessions on their smart phones. And they know they're bleeding customers to AT&T despite AT&T's crappier network.
AT&T doesn't get a signal inside buildings in my region, so I'm hoping Verizon will wise up...
Everything in a (well designed) single player game is achievable by your average person. The only question is how long (how much repetition) it takes them to get there. Traditionally more repetitions to complete = "harder" (take Ikaruga, for instance). But repeating the same thing over and over again is rarely fun.
Multiplayer is hard because it's a zero-sum competition. In single player, everyone can spend the time they need and "win". In multiplayer, there can be only one "best" player. Only one team can win a given round.
I'd rather see single player challenge framed as a matter of depth than exclusion. Depth (or "complexity", as you put it) is a gradient, and a lot harder to measure than the binary exclusion most "hardcore" WOW players seem to be looking for. They want "my little brother will never ever do this", not "I did this 2 months earlier and twice as well as my little brother"
Unfortunately, excluding the majority of your playerbase from accessing content isn't a very good investment of resources for gaming companies.
I'm not sure that "harder" makes sense in the context of RPGs (or perhaps single player games entirely). It isn't "hard" to sit around grinding things. Even WOW's 10 and 25-man raids can, by definition, only be hard for the first groups to clear them. After that people have the improved gear from that encounter, which makes it increasingly trivial.
In non-RPG single player games difficulty is managed through time and repetition too. When you die, do you restart where you died? A quicksave from 1 minute ago? The start of the level? The last auto-save? Do you have to start the entire game over every time you die? If so, is that really "hard", or just mind-numbingly stupid?
Yeah, you can advance anyway, if you're patient enough. But that doesn't mean advancement isn't tied to performance. The worse you (and your friends/guild) are, the slower you'll advance. The more likely you get impatient and give up entirely. Just like WOW has "hard-modes" now, games used to have better endings if you did better in-game. For a lot of people that meant going back and replaying the entire game to reach that objective. But for some l33t people, they got that ending the first time they played.
PVP, on the other hand, can truly be "hard". You can play PVP all night and day and still lose every single time. Be it in WOW, Counter-strike, or football against the kids down the street.
My point was in the definition of "game design". To me, game design refers to the creation of a game. Games don't require narratives to be games, or to be fun.
Chess does not have a "killer narrative" that makes you truly care when that rook takes your pawn. Does that mean chess is 1/10th the game of Deus Ex? Does that mean chess is "lazy" and a poorly designed game?
In high school his parents (and the teachers) kept close tabs on him. His dad made him get his homework assignments written in a calendar signed by every teacher. He wasn't allowed to use the computer until he did his work. I'm talking about in his senior year of high school.
It wasn't until he was on his own and allowed to fail, that he failed. Everquest had nothing to do with it. He didn't even start Everquest until halfway through the year.
If anything, it's demonstrative that spoiled kids fail to learn responsibility and take care of themselves. Frat guys fail out all the time for the same reason. The only difference is the single-activity mental focus of nerds, that makes it look different than the other kids partying and watching TV all week and also skipping exams and failing classes.
I'm not going to argue that games aren't designed to be addictive - sometimes maliciously so. But it's still a person's responsibility to step back and evaluate the time and reward they're spending with Entertainment Activity X compared to their goals in life.
It's especially interesting watching the latest WOW expansion, where they've continued to move further and further away from "addiction grinds" and instead towards "fun". Tedious content has been massively sped up. "Travelcraft" has been largely alleviated, so you can get almost anywhere you want without spending tens of minutes to get there. Dungeons have been made more accessible, with the harder "grinds" moved out to achievements which help you get better loot faster, but aren't strictly required to succeed.
And you know what? People post in the WOW forums every day whining that things are "too easy" just because they don't require hitting their head on a wall for 40 hours a week and months on end.
At one point the lead game designer who posts in the forums (Ghostcrawler) even stopped dancing around the "there are other things to do in the game..." excuse and flat-out said, "You beat the game [for now]. THAT IS OK. Go do something else!"
I really hope Blizzard knows they're doing a Good Thing, and won't succumb to the idiots demanding Everyone have to waste excessive amounts of time to play the game, just because those few people have nothing else to do. (or more realistically, refuse to do anything else)
Not that this solves all your other points, but we absolutely don't buy overpriced drinks and popcorn at the theaters. If we "insist" on having something, we bring it ourselves.
Besides, getting those enormous drinks and bathtub-sized buttered popcorns is begging for obesity.
Exactly. I'm still wishing I had the theatrical cut of Death Proof, but they only included the director's edition on the DVD I have. The movie feels about 30 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, and it's not really worth it.
Not to say the extra content is bad! This is the tough thing in movies - you can have 4 hours of awesome stuff, but if the pacing is wrong, something still has to get cut.
Exactly. The thing is, the content sellers CAN control this! A company I used to work for had ads getting flashier and gaudier, and the marketing head actually stood up and said "Ok, this is ridiculous and tacky. We need to put some rules in writing and start vetoing ugly/obnoxious advertisements".
Bad advertisements lose customers, which then lost advertising dollars. Companies need to start paying attention to this, instead of greedily grabbing at the first tacky flashing obnoxious ad dollar that comes their way.
(I've never used a browser without flash blocked by default since years back when the tv guide website had a race car start driving around on top of the webpage with loud VROOOMOMMMMM noises)
From a writing perspective, sure - there's not much to write when the users are driving the game. But to say it's lazy "game design"? Has he actually played Left 4 Dead?
What struck me hardest about Left 4 Dead is how amazingly well-designed the game is. The way the special monsters are designed to force players to work together. The way ammo and guns are shared, encouraging players to work together to find them. The way pills and grenades are severely limited to prevent hoarding and encourage sharing. The way hoardes are set up to be manually triggered by the users, giving time to hole up and plan strategies before the onset of zombies.
And of course the design of the levels to create the pace and opportunities for excitement.
Is Left 4 Dead lacking in "writing"? Sure. Is it lacking in game design? Hell no.
When people in WOW talk about "casual", it's usually raiders who spend 8 hours a night in-game talking down to the people who spend 6 hours a day in-game doing things other than raiding (with breaks for dinner, family, other hobbies, etc.)
Yeah, this is a stupid definition of Hardcore VS Casual. By this definition Counter-strike is casual, because you can play a match in 5 minutes and then log off.
A better definition would distinguish the two based on depth. Or in the deragatory sense that "hardcore" is frequently used, on learning curve.
A game that you can pick up and fully understand (and likely excel at) in one sitting is casual.
A game that can take weeks or months of playtime and research to fully understand and excel at is hardcore.
This does not remove the possibility of a good learning curve that let's casual players enjoy a hardcore game too, while not doing as well as their hardcore counterparts. WOW is an excellent example of this.
A game that can take weeks or months of tedious time-sinks to achieve minor goals...well, we need a name for that. And for the people who take pride in how much time they waste, and demand that their games waste even more of their time.
Exactly. I knew a Very Smart guy who has a full scholarship to engineering school. Dropped/failed out due to playing everquest and not showing up for exams.
But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time. He could tell you the HP of every creature in the Monster Manual, but got caught cheating by saving physics formulas in his calculator.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
People losing their jobs, homes, families, etc. to World of Warcraft is pretty rare.
WoW's success is that it's got a very accessible learning curve. You don't sit down in front of the game and immediately spend 10 hours grinding rats to go up 1 level.
In fact, their most recent content (and general direction) has been towards a FUN game, with fewer idiotic time-waste grinds. Sadly, there are people who bitch that this makes it "casual", calling themselves "hardcore" in the sense that means "have way too much free time".
Blizzard has put in a lot of end-game time-waste grinds to try to keep the infinite-time basement-dwellers occupied too. But they know the numbers, and have 0 interest (rightly so) in making content that only 1-2% of their userbase will ever see.
This has driven the approach in the latest expansion that the "easy" version of all end-game raids can be done with a 10-man group, with much harder versions of the same encounters that give better loot for the people who like spending 8 hours wiping on the same boss over and over again.
I've always found raids (10 or 25+ person groups) to be a huge waste of time and not much fun. Maybe I haven't found the right guild, or more likely, my schedule (wanting to have dinner with my wife, having a job to go to in the morning) isn't amenable to the 4-5 hour grinds that raids require.
"Hardcore raids" aren't the only end-game, and they're not even the real "hardcore" part of the game. They're the part of the game targeted at the people with the most time to waste, while the best and most dedicated players are theorycrafters and top arena PVPers.
Some of whom also have 4+ hour blocks of time to sit around in a raid waiting for 1 guy to get back from tacobell cause he had the munchies.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
Ah, thanks. Never seen LVM used for snapshots before, that's pretty nifty. (and listed as one of the main uses on the wiki page)
Exactly - the problem isn't that he gets attention on Slashdot. The problem is he keeps getting put on Fox News and other networks, spouting his BS. And that's something that attention on Slashdot and other sites can help fight back against.
I don't think the story is targeted at parents. It's targeted at sysadmins trying to clean Conficker off their network. Your parents won't run it, but perhaps Comcast will run it and get your parents fixed up. Or your parents' sysadmin at work will run it and fix their work computer.
It's kind of silly to expect TFA is targeted at "your parents" when it's using nmap to scan a network...
Just curious, but have you ever been fit for a running shoe at a running store? I'm no pro runner, but running shoes come in a wide variety of shapes, and you want the one that fits (or corrects) your running style.
If you're pronating already, and buy a shoe that makes you pronate even more, then yeah - it's gonna suck and feel like the shoes are contorting your running into something painful.
Can you give a few examples of the great shoes with thin rubber soles? Converse are what come to my mind. I have high arches, and found out about them through wearing Converse and getting foot pain if I ever stood or walked around in them for any length of time.
Maybe barefoot or thin soles is fine for someone with high arches running on uneven ground? But it sure sucks for walking on the flat floors we humans are subjected to everywhere we go nowdays.
No offense, but my family is all runners, and 10 miles is nothing. The same goes for coworkers and basically every runner I know. Most seem to run 5-10 miles on an "easy" day.
Anecdotal evidence from someone who has only run >6 miles 3 times isn't very compelling.
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 1
Your link didn't seem to cover it, but I thought the issue was maintaining internal consistency in your backup without shutting down the database before backing it up. That's why the internal backup tools exist.
The only time I ever had to hack into individual files on the filesystem was recovering a corrupt database. Definitely painful on postgres. But hopefully not something you have to do terribly often?
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I suspect if you're manually copying around the db's internal files you're doing it wrong. That's not the proper way to do replication, backups, or just about anything. Care to elaborate on what you were trying to do with the db's internal files?
Re:Postgres is looking better than ever
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Are you talking about 'like'? Postgres also has 'ilike' for case insensitive string comparisons. Defaulting to case insensitive is pretty rare in development.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I suspect this is why the swine flu in the US has been so much milder than the one in Mexico. The one killing people in Mexico is too deadly - it kills its hosts before they can pass it around. And perhaps also too severe for the hosts to stupidly go to work, the movies, etc. and pass it around for a few days before dying.
So the worst version of the virus has died off (hopefully) while the milder one keeps getting passed around.
What's interesting is that no one is dying outside of Mexico. Outside of tawdry racist comments, why would this be the case? Why is the flu so mild outside of Mexico?
The answer is, I think, Evolution. We tend to think of these viruses as evil killers. But does it benefit the flu to kill its hosts? It doesn't. I benefits most when the host stays alive, sneezing and coughing, spreading the flu.
So why did the deadly flu only kill people in Mexico? Because it was too severe. It killed off all of its hosts. Only a milder form lasted long enough to travel outside of Mexico.
That's my optimistic project so far, anyhow. Let's hope thats the case ^_^
A private citizen recording images or pictures, sure. But you're basically suggesting that every image and video recorded by the police, doctors, hospitals, and so on is "destined" to be public domain. Same for corporate documents, non-disclosure agreements, and every private document in existence.
That's an absurd approach. If someone violates the law or the rules of their job, they should be held accountable for it.
Sanitizing the world has nothing to do with it.
This attitude won't last forever. Arguably, it's already over. Verizon has made a lot of concessions on their smart phones. And they know they're bleeding customers to AT&T despite AT&T's crappier network.
AT&T doesn't get a signal inside buildings in my region, so I'm hoping Verizon will wise up...
Everything in a (well designed) single player game is achievable by your average person. The only question is how long (how much repetition) it takes them to get there. Traditionally more repetitions to complete = "harder" (take Ikaruga, for instance). But repeating the same thing over and over again is rarely fun.
Multiplayer is hard because it's a zero-sum competition. In single player, everyone can spend the time they need and "win". In multiplayer, there can be only one "best" player. Only one team can win a given round.
I'd rather see single player challenge framed as a matter of depth than exclusion. Depth (or "complexity", as you put it) is a gradient, and a lot harder to measure than the binary exclusion most "hardcore" WOW players seem to be looking for. They want "my little brother will never ever do this", not "I did this 2 months earlier and twice as well as my little brother"
Unfortunately, excluding the majority of your playerbase from accessing content isn't a very good investment of resources for gaming companies.
I'm not sure that "harder" makes sense in the context of RPGs (or perhaps single player games entirely). It isn't "hard" to sit around grinding things. Even WOW's 10 and 25-man raids can, by definition, only be hard for the first groups to clear them. After that people have the improved gear from that encounter, which makes it increasingly trivial.
In non-RPG single player games difficulty is managed through time and repetition too. When you die, do you restart where you died? A quicksave from 1 minute ago? The start of the level? The last auto-save? Do you have to start the entire game over every time you die? If so, is that really "hard", or just mind-numbingly stupid?
Yeah, you can advance anyway, if you're patient enough. But that doesn't mean advancement isn't tied to performance. The worse you (and your friends/guild) are, the slower you'll advance. The more likely you get impatient and give up entirely. Just like WOW has "hard-modes" now, games used to have better endings if you did better in-game. For a lot of people that meant going back and replaying the entire game to reach that objective. But for some l33t people, they got that ending the first time they played.
PVP, on the other hand, can truly be "hard". You can play PVP all night and day and still lose every single time. Be it in WOW, Counter-strike, or football against the kids down the street.
How do you compare Deus Ex to Left 4 Dead?
My point was in the definition of "game design". To me, game design refers to the creation of a game. Games don't require narratives to be games, or to be fun.
Chess does not have a "killer narrative" that makes you truly care when that rook takes your pawn. Does that mean chess is 1/10th the game of Deus Ex? Does that mean chess is "lazy" and a poorly designed game?
Of course not.
In high school his parents (and the teachers) kept close tabs on him. His dad made him get his homework assignments written in a calendar signed by every teacher. He wasn't allowed to use the computer until he did his work. I'm talking about in his senior year of high school.
It wasn't until he was on his own and allowed to fail, that he failed. Everquest had nothing to do with it. He didn't even start Everquest until halfway through the year.
If anything, it's demonstrative that spoiled kids fail to learn responsibility and take care of themselves. Frat guys fail out all the time for the same reason. The only difference is the single-activity mental focus of nerds, that makes it look different than the other kids partying and watching TV all week and also skipping exams and failing classes.
I'm not going to argue that games aren't designed to be addictive - sometimes maliciously so. But it's still a person's responsibility to step back and evaluate the time and reward they're spending with Entertainment Activity X compared to their goals in life.
It's especially interesting watching the latest WOW expansion, where they've continued to move further and further away from "addiction grinds" and instead towards "fun". Tedious content has been massively sped up. "Travelcraft" has been largely alleviated, so you can get almost anywhere you want without spending tens of minutes to get there. Dungeons have been made more accessible, with the harder "grinds" moved out to achievements which help you get better loot faster, but aren't strictly required to succeed.
And you know what? People post in the WOW forums every day whining that things are "too easy" just because they don't require hitting their head on a wall for 40 hours a week and months on end.
At one point the lead game designer who posts in the forums (Ghostcrawler) even stopped dancing around the "there are other things to do in the game..." excuse and flat-out said, "You beat the game [for now]. THAT IS OK. Go do something else!"
I really hope Blizzard knows they're doing a Good Thing, and won't succumb to the idiots demanding Everyone have to waste excessive amounts of time to play the game, just because those few people have nothing else to do. (or more realistically, refuse to do anything else)
Not that this solves all your other points, but we absolutely don't buy overpriced drinks and popcorn at the theaters. If we "insist" on having something, we bring it ourselves.
Besides, getting those enormous drinks and bathtub-sized buttered popcorns is begging for obesity.
Exactly. I'm still wishing I had the theatrical cut of Death Proof, but they only included the director's edition on the DVD I have. The movie feels about 30 minutes longer than the theatrical cut, and it's not really worth it.
Not to say the extra content is bad! This is the tough thing in movies - you can have 4 hours of awesome stuff, but if the pacing is wrong, something still has to get cut.
Exactly. The thing is, the content sellers CAN control this! A company I used to work for had ads getting flashier and gaudier, and the marketing head actually stood up and said "Ok, this is ridiculous and tacky. We need to put some rules in writing and start vetoing ugly/obnoxious advertisements".
Bad advertisements lose customers, which then lost advertising dollars. Companies need to start paying attention to this, instead of greedily grabbing at the first tacky flashing obnoxious ad dollar that comes their way.
(I've never used a browser without flash blocked by default since years back when the tv guide website had a race car start driving around on top of the webpage with loud VROOOMOMMMMM noises)
From a writing perspective, sure - there's not much to write when the users are driving the game. But to say it's lazy "game design"? Has he actually played Left 4 Dead?
What struck me hardest about Left 4 Dead is how amazingly well-designed the game is. The way the special monsters are designed to force players to work together. The way ammo and guns are shared, encouraging players to work together to find them. The way pills and grenades are severely limited to prevent hoarding and encourage sharing. The way hoardes are set up to be manually triggered by the users, giving time to hole up and plan strategies before the onset of zombies.
And of course the design of the levels to create the pace and opportunities for excitement.
Is Left 4 Dead lacking in "writing"? Sure. Is it lacking in game design? Hell no.
When people in WOW talk about "casual", it's usually raiders who spend 8 hours a night in-game talking down to the people who spend 6 hours a day in-game doing things other than raiding (with breaks for dinner, family, other hobbies, etc.)
Yeah, this is a stupid definition of Hardcore VS Casual. By this definition Counter-strike is casual, because you can play a match in 5 minutes and then log off.
A better definition would distinguish the two based on depth. Or in the deragatory sense that "hardcore" is frequently used, on learning curve.
A game that you can pick up and fully understand (and likely excel at) in one sitting is casual.
A game that can take weeks or months of playtime and research to fully understand and excel at is hardcore.
This does not remove the possibility of a good learning curve that let's casual players enjoy a hardcore game too, while not doing as well as their hardcore counterparts. WOW is an excellent example of this.
A game that can take weeks or months of tedious time-sinks to achieve minor goals...well, we need a name for that. And for the people who take pride in how much time they waste, and demand that their games waste even more of their time.
Exactly. I knew a Very Smart guy who has a full scholarship to engineering school. Dropped/failed out due to playing everquest and not showing up for exams.
But before that, in high school, he would memorize D&D books, and sit in front of anime all the time. He could tell you the HP of every creature in the Monster Manual, but got caught cheating by saving physics formulas in his calculator.
Non-chemical addiction is often a personal problem, not a problem with the entertainment they spend all their time with.
People losing their jobs, homes, families, etc. to World of Warcraft is pretty rare.
WoW's success is that it's got a very accessible learning curve. You don't sit down in front of the game and immediately spend 10 hours grinding rats to go up 1 level.
In fact, their most recent content (and general direction) has been towards a FUN game, with fewer idiotic time-waste grinds. Sadly, there are people who bitch that this makes it "casual", calling themselves "hardcore" in the sense that means "have way too much free time".
Blizzard has put in a lot of end-game time-waste grinds to try to keep the infinite-time basement-dwellers occupied too. But they know the numbers, and have 0 interest (rightly so) in making content that only 1-2% of their userbase will ever see.
This has driven the approach in the latest expansion that the "easy" version of all end-game raids can be done with a 10-man group, with much harder versions of the same encounters that give better loot for the people who like spending 8 hours wiping on the same boss over and over again.
I've always found raids (10 or 25+ person groups) to be a huge waste of time and not much fun. Maybe I haven't found the right guild, or more likely, my schedule (wanting to have dinner with my wife, having a job to go to in the morning) isn't amenable to the 4-5 hour grinds that raids require.
"Hardcore raids" aren't the only end-game, and they're not even the real "hardcore" part of the game. They're the part of the game targeted at the people with the most time to waste, while the best and most dedicated players are theorycrafters and top arena PVPers.
Some of whom also have 4+ hour blocks of time to sit around in a raid waiting for 1 guy to get back from tacobell cause he had the munchies.
Ah, thanks. Never seen LVM used for snapshots before, that's pretty nifty. (and listed as one of the main uses on the wiki page)
Exactly - the problem isn't that he gets attention on Slashdot. The problem is he keeps getting put on Fox News and other networks, spouting his BS. And that's something that attention on Slashdot and other sites can help fight back against.
I don't think the story is targeted at parents. It's targeted at sysadmins trying to clean Conficker off their network. Your parents won't run it, but perhaps Comcast will run it and get your parents fixed up. Or your parents' sysadmin at work will run it and fix their work computer.
It's kind of silly to expect TFA is targeted at "your parents" when it's using nmap to scan a network...
Just curious, but have you ever been fit for a running shoe at a running store? I'm no pro runner, but running shoes come in a wide variety of shapes, and you want the one that fits (or corrects) your running style.
If you're pronating already, and buy a shoe that makes you pronate even more, then yeah - it's gonna suck and feel like the shoes are contorting your running into something painful.
Can you give a few examples of the great shoes with thin rubber soles? Converse are what come to my mind. I have high arches, and found out about them through wearing Converse and getting foot pain if I ever stood or walked around in them for any length of time.
Maybe barefoot or thin soles is fine for someone with high arches running on uneven ground? But it sure sucks for walking on the flat floors we humans are subjected to everywhere we go nowdays.
No offense, but my family is all runners, and 10 miles is nothing. The same goes for coworkers and basically every runner I know. Most seem to run 5-10 miles on an "easy" day.
Anecdotal evidence from someone who has only run >6 miles 3 times isn't very compelling.
Your link didn't seem to cover it, but I thought the issue was maintaining internal consistency in your backup without shutting down the database before backing it up. That's why the internal backup tools exist.
The only time I ever had to hack into individual files on the filesystem was recovering a corrupt database. Definitely painful on postgres. But hopefully not something you have to do terribly often?
I suspect if you're manually copying around the db's internal files you're doing it wrong. That's not the proper way to do replication, backups, or just about anything. Care to elaborate on what you were trying to do with the db's internal files?
Are you talking about 'like'? Postgres also has 'ilike' for case insensitive string comparisons. Defaulting to case insensitive is pretty rare in development.