I've been through a period of that. Also, a period of dreaming about Doom, a period of dreaming about Diablo, and a period of dreaming about Magic: The Gathering. Some of my best dreams were going into an attic and finding hundreds of ancient and valuable M:TG playing cards. Probably getting that one halfway scrambled with stories of old baseball cards, I can only guess.
I've also had dreams about a stick-figure game I play called Kingdom of Loathing, up to and including dreams where I meet and have conversations with the game's creators. (I have met the creators, but this was years before that happened.)
I'm still somewhat amused by people who bought a gaming console and expected to treat it as a personal computer...
Mostly, yes, I'm kind of there with you--I bought my PS3 without even knowing it was possible to run an OS on it, and still don't care. However, considering the military invested in a cluster (no idea if it's Beowulf style) of these for computing purposes, it's well known that SOMEONE is using them for just that reason, and others might be inclined to as well. They just had a/. article about how the military will have trouble finding unpatched versions of PS3's to replace any broken equipment in the future. Seems kinda boneheaded for Sony to shut them out. Or more likely, Sony has secret back-room agreements with the military to keep them in unpatched hardware, while everybody else has to deal with the restriction, and that seems silly, too.
An animal, raised right by humans for food, suffers FAR LESS than its wild counterpart. Being raised by a good rancher is a great bargain for a cow. A pleasant life with plentiful food and no predation, in exchange for a quick and painless death. If I were a cow, I'd take that over constant fear of predators and the threat of starvation.
While this is mostly true, I think you may be failing to work life expectancy into this. The average cow that gets eaten dies very young -- I think just a year, maybe two. In human terms, given a choice between a cushy life where you're killed painlessly at age 20, or a difficult life where the odds are you'll live to be 80, I'm not sure I'd want to give up those additional 60 years. That's just not a good deal for me. Sure, a few lucky bulls and many of the females are kept around longer for breeding purposes, and that's not a bad life. But the average steer has his life cut pretty short. Oh, and don't even get me started about the castration...
That said, I still don't think it's wrong to raise animals humanely and eat them. Just not sure it's the best deal for the animal's point of view.
Heck, I can one-up whatever they're doing. At least 50% of my own software was written with a cat on my lap or a dog curled up under my desk. All of my software doesn't just avoid harming animals, it was created while actively bringing animals love, warmth, and satisfaction.
The weird thing is how many times it's trivial for you to determine what the other half is. Couldn't tell you how many times my wife has hung up the phone and started to explain what she'd just learned, but I'd already picked up 95% of the details and don't really need filled in.
I think there's a feedback loop with this, too. If the person on the other end is really loud, you tend to get louder to compensate. I'll catch myself yelling, and realize it's just because I've got the volume up too high on the earpiece. Turn that down, and the conversation can return to more normal levels.
Meh. I'd like to know things about my DNA. If I could give it to someone who promised confidentiality in exchange for some useful feedback, I would. Of course, if they ever leaked info they weren't supposed to or used it in unethical ways, I'd sue them to the fullest extent that HIPAA (or whatever other relevant laws) allowed. Is there a reason to think this particular medical information wouldn't be treated like other medical information?
I think that marriage is basically an establishment of religion and should be taken out of law altogether. Replace it with a civil union, legally, and then let churches “marry” (or not marry) people however they see fit, though such a religious “marriage” would no longer be a government-recognised status. That’s what churches are best at, right... squabbling over their religious disagreements? If two people want to get “married”, they can go to their Church(TM) and get a bona-fide Marriage(TM), blessed by their religious entity of choice; whereas, if two people want to be legally united with the certain legal benefits that this entails, the government can give them a civil union regardless of who they are. That’s the most sensible solution.
Historical fact: up until the last 800 years or so, the Church(TM) didn't have much to do with Marriage(TM). Most of the time a marriage was a contract between two people. It only became the fashion to expect the Church to officiate and have control over marriages in the late middle ages or early renaissance. Before then a marriage was two people declaring they were married. Yes, this was often in the presence of friends and family, and often there was a lot of religious talk around, but that wasn't what made the marriage official.
Even today, at least some folks in the Jewish tradition will say being married is mostly considering yourself married, and doesn't require any official religious stamp to Make It So.
If you think about it, marriage clearly existed before any of the modern practiced religions existed. As such, it seems pretty clear that marriage is simply a human phenomenon that religion has taken over. Counter to your proposal, I propose that marriage be given back to the people and continue to serve as a simple guideline for government and medical and contractual purposes, and if the Church(TM) wants to go around telling people what is and isn't a valid union, they should invent some other term for it, like Our Church's Approved Religious Union(TM) or something like that.
Well, I can't speak for all country dwellers, but on the three or four nights right around the full moon my wife and I close the blinds before going to bed, and that does an adequate job of keeping the light down. The rest of the time moonlight isn't so troublesome for us--certainly beats the street light that used to shine directly into my eyes as a teenager. I thought I was just angsty and nocturnal, and it took me moving off to college to realize that it was the streetlight keeping me up.
The noises of the country and the noises of the city have always seemed a wash to me. Both can be noisy, both can be tuned out. Though honestly I'd still take the wind whistling through the pines over the sound of cars on the interstate as the sound I'd rather be ignoring.
Seconded, more or less. There is no excuse for a business-critical app to not be compatible with SP3 at this point. Hell, there's no reason for it to not be compatible with Vista at this point. Those developers knew the end was coming, just like the rest of us.
Um, thanks... from four years ago? That's how long ago I started coding my own text-based MMORPG, and another one that I've been playing has been around for 7+ years.
I know you're joking (or at least modded funny) but there ARE text-based MMORPG's out there. Quite a few of them. Many of them do tend to be free for casual players, with either a donation model or a "pay for expanded content" model, or something along those lines. Often they're not "no graphics" but just static images, which is probably nearly the same thing as far as most people used to exploring 3-D worlds are concerned.
Your response makes it obvious that you are an academic. Academics don't have to produce anything (besides words). I am an Engineer at a private company....
As an engineer, you focus on "what works" and "immediate results" because that's what they pay you for. This is a good thing, because that's exactly what we want from engineers: functional results.
However, I think you would be making a mistake to judge academic research based on the same standards a business engineer works within. The nature of academic research requires that it resides at the fringe where things aren't understood well--that's where the research is. And of course that's a fuzzy area that respectable engineers shouldn't go anywhere near, unless they want disastrous results.
It's okay for academics to only have a limited certainty about their results, or to need more time or data, or further research. It's not okay at all for an engineer to make guesses about uncertain things. Trying to apply one's standards to the other is misguided at best. Imagine dismissing Einstein's theory of relativity because, "we need another 10 years before we're able to test any of it."
(I realize your post was a reply to some other post that I've missed, so I'm not necessarily commenting on your refutation of someone else's points. But the general disparagement of academics simply because it's not designed for the same thing engineering is strikes a false chord with me.)
I have always thought there was room for a sidekick game, where your entire goal is to support the real hero of the story. You're the brains behind their brawn, the one that watches their back and keeps them going, even though the hero gets all the credit.
Bonus points if the game allows you the opportunity to sabotage them out of jealousy at certain critical points.
I run a web-based superhero game that's mostly text, with some supporting graphics. I've got several dedicated players from a school for the blind, and a smattering of blind or limited-sight players from other places. They've all expressed delight that my game is very accessible. It wasn't especially intentional on my part, just a side effect of a game that's text-heavy and mostly HTML.
I also play another game called Kingdom of Loathing which fits a very similar profile. Their setup uses a lot of text and small images of stick figures for the art. Their game involves characters consuming booze as a way to get more turns, so it may not be entirely kid-friendly, though the game otherwise does aim for PG-13.
Yes, and it was even worse in the comic. Nite Owl types "RAMESES" and the computer prompts him with the equivalent of "you're almost there! Do you want to add more letters?" to which Nite Owl then looks at the book and adds "II" (that's 2, in Roman numerals) to complete the password. What kind of security system tells you if you're warm and helps you break in?
Starvation drives people to the perfectly-rational extremes of stealing food (or stealing the means of obtaining food).
Yes, but how often is actual starvation truly a risk (here in the states, at least)? Desperate for money is one thing, starvation is several steps farther down the line, and generally if you're literally starving, you're probably not reading a "how to get a job" book.
I'd argue there's far more room for a game designer to be part of a startup or work on their own, thus creating their own job, than there would be for marine biologists. You don't have to sit around waiting for an opening at an existing company to create a game. Yeah, I know, it may be difficult to eat in the meantime...
Forgot to add one very important additional point: I am a game designer, and I find it enormously satisfying. It's not what puts food on the table, but it's what I do with my evenings and weekends. Time management is an issue, but I couldn't imagine how empty things would seem if I didn't have the regular creative outlet of working on the game.
Now I'm not working for one of the big shops, I'm doing my own thing, working out of my own house. I'm not making big bucks, but the game has paid for itself for a large portion of the two and a half years it's been open to the public, even with a relatively small community. Since I'm in charge, I get to apply creative writing, graphic design, strategy, logic, programming -- all that stuff, and it's all fun. Glamorous, no, not at all. But satisfying? Absolutely.
the "glamorous" lifestyle of the video game designer
I see this quoted a lot in order to shoot it down as a straw man, but I've never heard anyone else actually suggest game design is a particularly glamorous job. Sports stars, sure, you see them playing games and making millions. Or movie stars. Most kids don't even know the names of any game designers, except for perhaps Sid Meier, since he's the Tyler Perry of game design and always insists on putting his name at the beginning of everything.
I think the only appeal here, probably the only assumption, is "games are fun to play." As such, being around games is likely to be more interesting or fun than being around... well, anything else. (Guess my aerospace engineer friend may disagree and say rockets are about as much fun.) But I don't think there's nearly as much implied glamor as the cynics claim there is when they're shooting it down.
That said, you're absolutely right that the environment is frequently awful, and researching the field is a good idea. Any field -- I know a lot of graphic designers who were surprised to find the same thing -- it's fun to draw things and make pictures, but the industry demands crazy hours, short deadlines, and doesn't pay particularly well for sucking all the creativity right out of your soul.
Absolutely true. I took two semesters of C++ because I was interested in it, even though I was a physics major. One of my classmates was a music performance major (saxophone), who just wanted to get a taste of something different. People might take the intro class out of genuine interest, without any intention of majoring. How many classes did the rest of you take in subjects that weren't your major?
It's trivial to multiply 206 by 2/3 on a calculater,... This is maybe third or fourth grade level math here people, and it's kinda sad that there is even any confusion about it.
Uh, I hate to point this out, but the proper spelling of calculator is probably 4th grade level, and it's kind of sad that there's any confusion about THAT, either. Especially when it's spelled properly in the subject line of the post you replied to. My point isn't to be fussy about spelling, but to point out some people are good at some things and bad at others, and anyone who calls the other person foolish for their failings is likely to end up a hypocrite.
Of course, when you've got 206 people taking a vote, at least ONE of them ought to be able to do proper math.
Not true. I studied manuals religiously. As a child, they were the first things I would get to see, while my parents were still driving home from the store. As a sibling, it was the thing I could look at while my brother was playing. As a child of divorce, the manual was the thing I could take with me when I couldn't take the computer.
Now, it depends a lot on the game whether the manual was worth looking at, but some of them were fountains of information. I still HAVE my manual for Bard's Tale, because it was so neat, and the casing doubled as a city map.
As others have mentioned, there are a lot of crap manuals out there these days. Personally, I'd rather see better manuals and more of them, then to phase them out over some misguided idea that's the way to save the planet.
I have no idea if its related or purely coincidental, but ever since I've had the 'Disable Ads' box checked, I've never received mod-points, despite receiving them somewhat regularly up till then.
I've had the same experience. I was getting mod points about every week or two and did for about a year straight. Since I disabled ads about a year ago, I haven't gotten mod points once. I'm mostly just here to read and occasionally comment, so I'm not too bothered by it, but if there's a direct correlation it'd be nice if they warned us. And if there isn't a correlation, then what the heck is going on in our cases?
Slashdot Mirror
I've been through a period of that. Also, a period of dreaming about Doom, a period of dreaming about Diablo, and a period of dreaming about Magic: The Gathering. Some of my best dreams were going into an attic and finding hundreds of ancient and valuable M:TG playing cards. Probably getting that one halfway scrambled with stories of old baseball cards, I can only guess.
I've also had dreams about a stick-figure game I play called Kingdom of Loathing, up to and including dreams where I meet and have conversations with the game's creators. (I have met the creators, but this was years before that happened.)
Is that true gamery enough for you?
I'm still somewhat amused by people who bought a gaming console and expected to treat it as a personal computer...
Mostly, yes, I'm kind of there with you--I bought my PS3 without even knowing it was possible to run an OS on it, and still don't care. However, considering the military invested in a cluster (no idea if it's Beowulf style) of these for computing purposes, it's well known that SOMEONE is using them for just that reason, and others might be inclined to as well. They just had a /. article about how the military will have trouble finding unpatched versions of PS3's to replace any broken equipment in the future. Seems kinda boneheaded for Sony to shut them out. Or more likely, Sony has secret back-room agreements with the military to keep them in unpatched hardware, while everybody else has to deal with the restriction, and that seems silly, too.
An animal, raised right by humans for food, suffers FAR LESS than its wild counterpart. Being raised by a good rancher is a great bargain for a cow. A pleasant life with plentiful food and no predation, in exchange for a quick and painless death. If I were a cow, I'd take that over constant fear of predators and the threat of starvation.
While this is mostly true, I think you may be failing to work life expectancy into this. The average cow that gets eaten dies very young -- I think just a year, maybe two. In human terms, given a choice between a cushy life where you're killed painlessly at age 20, or a difficult life where the odds are you'll live to be 80, I'm not sure I'd want to give up those additional 60 years. That's just not a good deal for me. Sure, a few lucky bulls and many of the females are kept around longer for breeding purposes, and that's not a bad life. But the average steer has his life cut pretty short. Oh, and don't even get me started about the castration ...
That said, I still don't think it's wrong to raise animals humanely and eat them. Just not sure it's the best deal for the animal's point of view.
Heck, I can one-up whatever they're doing. At least 50% of my own software was written with a cat on my lap or a dog curled up under my desk. All of my software doesn't just avoid harming animals, it was created while actively bringing animals love, warmth, and satisfaction.
The weird thing is how many times it's trivial for you to determine what the other half is. Couldn't tell you how many times my wife has hung up the phone and started to explain what she'd just learned, but I'd already picked up 95% of the details and don't really need filled in.
I think there's a feedback loop with this, too. If the person on the other end is really loud, you tend to get louder to compensate. I'll catch myself yelling, and realize it's just because I've got the volume up too high on the earpiece. Turn that down, and the conversation can return to more normal levels.
Awww. And I was going to add you to my list as the #8 most insightful thing I'd read today.
Wait, did I say insightful? I meant "inciteful."
Meh. I'd like to know things about my DNA. If I could give it to someone who promised confidentiality in exchange for some useful feedback, I would. Of course, if they ever leaked info they weren't supposed to or used it in unethical ways, I'd sue them to the fullest extent that HIPAA (or whatever other relevant laws) allowed. Is there a reason to think this particular medical information wouldn't be treated like other medical information?
I think that marriage is basically an establishment of religion and should be taken out of law altogether. Replace it with a civil union, legally, and then let churches “marry” (or not marry) people however they see fit, though such a religious “marriage” would no longer be a government-recognised status. That’s what churches are best at, right... squabbling over their religious disagreements? If two people want to get “married”, they can go to their Church(TM) and get a bona-fide Marriage(TM), blessed by their religious entity of choice; whereas, if two people want to be legally united with the certain legal benefits that this entails, the government can give them a civil union regardless of who they are. That’s the most sensible solution.
Historical fact: up until the last 800 years or so, the Church(TM) didn't have much to do with Marriage(TM). Most of the time a marriage was a contract between two people. It only became the fashion to expect the Church to officiate and have control over marriages in the late middle ages or early renaissance. Before then a marriage was two people declaring they were married. Yes, this was often in the presence of friends and family, and often there was a lot of religious talk around, but that wasn't what made the marriage official.
Even today, at least some folks in the Jewish tradition will say being married is mostly considering yourself married, and doesn't require any official religious stamp to Make It So.
If you think about it, marriage clearly existed before any of the modern practiced religions existed. As such, it seems pretty clear that marriage is simply a human phenomenon that religion has taken over. Counter to your proposal, I propose that marriage be given back to the people and continue to serve as a simple guideline for government and medical and contractual purposes, and if the Church(TM) wants to go around telling people what is and isn't a valid union, they should invent some other term for it, like Our Church's Approved Religious Union(TM) or something like that.
Technically you have to raise prices by 50% to make up a 30% loss.
Well, I can't speak for all country dwellers, but on the three or four nights right around the full moon my wife and I close the blinds before going to bed, and that does an adequate job of keeping the light down. The rest of the time moonlight isn't so troublesome for us--certainly beats the street light that used to shine directly into my eyes as a teenager. I thought I was just angsty and nocturnal, and it took me moving off to college to realize that it was the streetlight keeping me up.
The noises of the country and the noises of the city have always seemed a wash to me. Both can be noisy, both can be tuned out. Though honestly I'd still take the wind whistling through the pines over the sound of cars on the interstate as the sound I'd rather be ignoring.
Seconded, more or less. There is no excuse for a business-critical app to not be compatible with SP3 at this point. Hell, there's no reason for it to not be compatible with Vista at this point. Those developers knew the end was coming, just like the rest of us.
Um, thanks ... from four years ago? That's how long ago I started coding my own text-based MMORPG, and another one that I've been playing has been around for 7+ years.
I know you're joking (or at least modded funny) but there ARE text-based MMORPG's out there. Quite a few of them. Many of them do tend to be free for casual players, with either a donation model or a "pay for expanded content" model, or something along those lines. Often they're not "no graphics" but just static images, which is probably nearly the same thing as far as most people used to exploring 3-D worlds are concerned.
Your response makes it obvious that you are an academic. Academics don't have to produce anything (besides words). I am an Engineer at a private company. ...
As an engineer, you focus on "what works" and "immediate results" because that's what they pay you for. This is a good thing, because that's exactly what we want from engineers: functional results.
However, I think you would be making a mistake to judge academic research based on the same standards a business engineer works within. The nature of academic research requires that it resides at the fringe where things aren't understood well--that's where the research is. And of course that's a fuzzy area that respectable engineers shouldn't go anywhere near, unless they want disastrous results.
It's okay for academics to only have a limited certainty about their results, or to need more time or data, or further research. It's not okay at all for an engineer to make guesses about uncertain things. Trying to apply one's standards to the other is misguided at best. Imagine dismissing Einstein's theory of relativity because, "we need another 10 years before we're able to test any of it."
(I realize your post was a reply to some other post that I've missed, so I'm not necessarily commenting on your refutation of someone else's points. But the general disparagement of academics simply because it's not designed for the same thing engineering is strikes a false chord with me.)
I have always thought there was room for a sidekick game, where your entire goal is to support the real hero of the story. You're the brains behind their brawn, the one that watches their back and keeps them going, even though the hero gets all the credit.
Bonus points if the game allows you the opportunity to sabotage them out of jealousy at certain critical points.
I also play another game called Kingdom of Loathing which fits a very similar profile. Their setup uses a lot of text and small images of stick figures for the art. Their game involves characters consuming booze as a way to get more turns, so it may not be entirely kid-friendly, though the game otherwise does aim for PG-13.
Yes, and it was even worse in the comic. Nite Owl types "RAMESES" and the computer prompts him with the equivalent of "you're almost there! Do you want to add more letters?" to which Nite Owl then looks at the book and adds "II" (that's 2, in Roman numerals) to complete the password. What kind of security system tells you if you're warm and helps you break in?
Starvation drives people to the perfectly-rational extremes of stealing food (or stealing the means of obtaining food).
Yes, but how often is actual starvation truly a risk (here in the states, at least)? Desperate for money is one thing, starvation is several steps farther down the line, and generally if you're literally starving, you're probably not reading a "how to get a job" book.
I'd argue there's far more room for a game designer to be part of a startup or work on their own, thus creating their own job, than there would be for marine biologists. You don't have to sit around waiting for an opening at an existing company to create a game. Yeah, I know, it may be difficult to eat in the meantime ...
Forgot to add one very important additional point: I am a game designer, and I find it enormously satisfying. It's not what puts food on the table, but it's what I do with my evenings and weekends. Time management is an issue, but I couldn't imagine how empty things would seem if I didn't have the regular creative outlet of working on the game.
Now I'm not working for one of the big shops, I'm doing my own thing, working out of my own house. I'm not making big bucks, but the game has paid for itself for a large portion of the two and a half years it's been open to the public, even with a relatively small community. Since I'm in charge, I get to apply creative writing, graphic design, strategy, logic, programming -- all that stuff, and it's all fun. Glamorous, no, not at all. But satisfying? Absolutely.
the "glamorous" lifestyle of the video game designer
I see this quoted a lot in order to shoot it down as a straw man, but I've never heard anyone else actually suggest game design is a particularly glamorous job. Sports stars, sure, you see them playing games and making millions. Or movie stars. Most kids don't even know the names of any game designers, except for perhaps Sid Meier, since he's the Tyler Perry of game design and always insists on putting his name at the beginning of everything.
... well, anything else. (Guess my aerospace engineer friend may disagree and say rockets are about as much fun.) But I don't think there's nearly as much implied glamor as the cynics claim there is when they're shooting it down.
I think the only appeal here, probably the only assumption, is "games are fun to play." As such, being around games is likely to be more interesting or fun than being around
That said, you're absolutely right that the environment is frequently awful, and researching the field is a good idea. Any field -- I know a lot of graphic designers who were surprised to find the same thing -- it's fun to draw things and make pictures, but the industry demands crazy hours, short deadlines, and doesn't pay particularly well for sucking all the creativity right out of your soul.
Absolutely true. I took two semesters of C++ because I was interested in it, even though I was a physics major. One of my classmates was a music performance major (saxophone), who just wanted to get a taste of something different. People might take the intro class out of genuine interest, without any intention of majoring. How many classes did the rest of you take in subjects that weren't your major?
It's trivial to multiply 206 by 2/3 on a calculater, ... This is maybe third or fourth grade level math here people, and it's kinda sad that there is even any confusion about it.
Uh, I hate to point this out, but the proper spelling of calculator is probably 4th grade level, and it's kind of sad that there's any confusion about THAT, either. Especially when it's spelled properly in the subject line of the post you replied to. My point isn't to be fussy about spelling, but to point out some people are good at some things and bad at others, and anyone who calls the other person foolish for their failings is likely to end up a hypocrite.
Of course, when you've got 206 people taking a vote, at least ONE of them ought to be able to do proper math.
Nobody reads instructions.
Not true. I studied manuals religiously. As a child, they were the first things I would get to see, while my parents were still driving home from the store. As a sibling, it was the thing I could look at while my brother was playing. As a child of divorce, the manual was the thing I could take with me when I couldn't take the computer.
Now, it depends a lot on the game whether the manual was worth looking at, but some of them were fountains of information. I still HAVE my manual for Bard's Tale, because it was so neat, and the casing doubled as a city map.
As others have mentioned, there are a lot of crap manuals out there these days. Personally, I'd rather see better manuals and more of them, then to phase them out over some misguided idea that's the way to save the planet.
I have no idea if its related or purely coincidental, but ever since I've had the 'Disable Ads' box checked, I've never received mod-points, despite receiving them somewhat regularly up till then.
I've had the same experience. I was getting mod points about every week or two and did for about a year straight. Since I disabled ads about a year ago, I haven't gotten mod points once. I'm mostly just here to read and occasionally comment, so I'm not too bothered by it, but if there's a direct correlation it'd be nice if they warned us. And if there isn't a correlation, then what the heck is going on in our cases?