As much as Blizzard lost my fandom with D3, (well, starting with SC2, but D3 was the last straw), I have to applaud them for Adventure Mode and the Bounty system!
I've been saying for a long time now that the post-WoW MMO would need these in a shared world. And sure, the "shared" part is the hard part, but it's good to see a revival of "randomly generate a level, then randomly generate quest-specific content, then modify the level as needed for the content". Back in the era of low-res games, when worlds were big, that idea wasn't rare, but it seems to have vanished.
And, yes, you can do that in an MMO and not have it suck. Sure, random content is often dull, repetitive, and uninvolving, though I'd argue that's just fine for quickly-passed low-level content. But take that same engine, which can generate a random level with some random quest-specific stuff, and make it a tool for world builders. Randomly generate an expansion zone and most of the hours of labor of building that expansion zone is done. Let the world builder focus on the unique elements, the humor and amazing sights and, well, the fun stuff. Take an auto-generated quest and add the creative writing element that makes it interesting, maybe custom design the boss, or maybe write something inspired by how the random boss turned out if that was particularly wild, and done.
You could make a vast and expanding world with new content being cranked out just as fast as the world/quest builders can generate new ideas, by letting a good random content generator provide the starting point and backdrop and all the "flyover country" in a new area.
. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it
This! This is why there were intelligent people on both sides of the evolution "debate" for so long, until the talk.origins FAQ matured (now there's really no excuse). So much BS and known false crap was taught in high school science classes and would turn up in casual searches back when the internet was young, that it was quite easy for someone from a religious background to assume that "evil-ution" was some big scam.
It's only because of the many people on talk.origins who respected the other side as intelligent people, and listened to their arguments that real debunking of the creationist position happened. It turned out that what many people had been taught about evolution (and still are!) was in fact wrong, and they were right to be skeptical of evolution based on what they had been taught. Once some intelligent, adult debate happened back on the place we don't speak of (unsurprisingly, it took a while), people realized that what they really needed to debunk was "bad high school-taught evolution myths", and 99% of skeptics would be convinced by explaining the actual science. (You wouldn't believe some of the BS taught in schools in the US South, apparently sincerely, as the science of evolution.)
For Holistic Nonsense there's a different problem. I don't know what it is, but you can bet there's some equally non-obvious fundamental misunderstandings at work here, and the only way to convince believers in that BS is to understand why they believe it, and address the root of that belief in places like Wikipedia. Calling them stupid won't convince anyone.
How does the Tesla reverse anyway? Given the way Hipsters love it, I assume it's a "fixie" and spins the motor backwards to reverse, but I haven't actually checked.
Sports cars were two seaters. They were not high revving. They just sounded like they were.
Meh, I reject that entirely. There's a word for a 2-seat car: coupe. The Alfa was a roadster, but it was a poser car, a girl's convertible, not a sports car.
I would venture an opinion on whether the TransAm was a sports car, but I try to avoid religious arguments on Slashdot. I get in enough trouble for questioning the AGW religion without bringing on the TransAm fans as well!
Sure, definitions change, but it has always been the case that "sports car == corners well" and "muscle car === accelerates well" The whole concept of muscle cars exists because not all cars that get to 60 fast can turn a corner. A GT car is just a luxury muscle car (or alternatively, a muscle car is a cheap-ass GT car).
For purists, a sports car is a "four wheel motorcycle", open top, high revving small engine, and very light. But for most car magazines, anything built to corner well counted.
Sports cars have the brake and gas pedals close together so that one can heel-and-toe them. Wannabe-sports sedans copy this, for the same marketing reason we were afflicted by spoilers on family sedans for a generation.
Each "standard" has its place, the fault if any of Tesla was in believing their own hype that the Model S was some kind of sports car (hint: when your car's over 2 tons empty, that's not what "sports car" means. GT cruiser maybe, but no one's gonna be heel-and-toeing it through the race track in anything like stock.)
I saw Woz speak a few years ago at a conference, and he was pretty anti-cloud - he says you should own your own data, in your hand, on (ideally) a computer you built and programmed yourself. He's spot on.
You know, chairs built by hand by an individual craftsman really are better than those mass-produced chairs. Funny how price matters. Automation always means some loss of control, but huge gains in cost and repeatability. "It's going to railroad, come railroad time".
Oh, CoH was just plain awesome. So much creativity and fun in the player base, even if many of the quests were half-baked. The feel of playing it was just right. BAM, knocked 6 guys across the room. Tanking 80 guys at once and holding agro until your buddy opens up with his pure-offence class. Sadly, they lost it somewhere, and Champions and the others never really had the same feel.
The problem with Eve is it has the meanest community around. Even by MMO forum standards, Eve is bad. Cool movies of the big battles tho.
PvP can be fun, if the people you play with are nice, but it's not really a substitute for content. What ever happen to first-person games with content, anyhow?
It's possible someone could make an MMO I'd really enjoy. But it wouldn't play anything like WoW. As you say: Blizzard nailed that, no need for another. Let alone 50 clones. While I'm not going to say "it can't be good if it's an MMO", as that is simply unimaginative, no MMO can substitute for a well-plotted single-player fantasy RPG.
Heck, any give recent FF game is an unlimited number of sequels! Was it FF (or Dragon Age? or both?) that let you script your battles to the point that even the fights were something to watch, not something to do?
None of that is actually true, is the thing. It's just "they turk our jerbs" nonsense.
Sure, there are some ridiculously exploitive (and already illegal) places with nothing but H1-Bs, being paid next to nothing. The quality of work from those "contractors" is about what you might expect. It's sad they exist, but they are blatantly illegal.
But a big tech companies, pretty much any US public corp, doesn't play those games. Too much to lose by screwing with federal law. The salaries of all H1-B employees is public record (you can't find your co-worker by mane, by you can, by hiring date. Believe me, the salaries get around. And at least in Silly Valley the H1-B workers cost the same as anyone else: salary is a bit less, but when you add lawyer fees for sponsorship it works out. These guys and gals make more than most people outside of California make in the same position.
H1-Bs are simply not a good solution for cheap labor: it doesn't even make sense. It's vastly cheaper to pay the same guy $30K in India than bring him here! You have to bring the best here to retain them. And sure, they concoct job descriptions to hire the guys they've chosen, but not because they're cheap, but because they're the best of the pool and you want to keep those guys.
Give me one reason besides racism why a guy from India who's proven himself good shouldn't be favored over unknown new hires from the US.
My thought is that once you get a face-to-face interview they have already selected you, and the other 5 to 10 candidates, based on their technical skills.
At every large company I've worked at, we've hired about 1/3 of the people brought in for technical interviews. It's all about demonstrating technical ability in person, live, and on the spot, while showing that you don't become a jerk under stress.
People who not only solve the problems (problems that really aren't that hard outside of the time and other pressures), but show passion for doing so tend to get hired. People who "go into geek mode", forget the stress of the interview, and just work with you like is was a design session tend to get hired. People who stress out unduly, lock up, act phony, or for whatever reason don't show "will be OK to work with" tend not to.
I've found the best attitude to show is one of "wow, this is a cool problem, I love coding problems, let's dive in together and solve this". It's hard to fake that, but if that would be your natural reaction outside an interview it can be so in the interview, with a bit of practice.
The problem with being eight years older is that you are, indeed, eight years older. Past a certain age it seems that the only jobs you will be able to get is through your network.
My resume says "20+ years of experience", and I get recruiters contacting me constantly. People want me to help fix the problem in their shops, to be the one doing the morphing, not to be the one needing any sort of molding myself. Or they just want someone who will simply do the job right without needing any supervision - take some of the load off of overworked managers. I've learned that latter is a warning sign - managers should be trying to fix their structural issues when it's that crazy.
In Silicon Valley the average time someone stays a a given job is about 18 months. When I first came there, having had 7 years at my previous job, everyone I interviewed with asked about that as if it were the strangest thing they'd ever seen.
1 year is too short, but a few 1-year jobs followed by longer stays shouldn't bother anyone. You learn the trade faster by changing tech stacks a few times when you're young, in any case.
Where are people getting this? My career didn't start picking up until I was over 35. While I've interviewed at places that didn't actually want a senior engineer (they meant 5-10 years when they wrote "senior"), I blame myself for not asking better questions earlier about those jobs.
Damn straight. Real companies have technical tracks for a full career that don't require management. Nothing beats software development - management is the safe place to stick second-rate coders to limit the arm they can do!
Sure, because racism always elevates the conversation here at/.. Maybe a GNAA post to, to liven things up?
I'm happy to compete with H1-B workers - they have the same costs of living I do, and they'll almost always be sending checks home on top of that. What I can't compete with is that same guy working in India (well, unless it's Bangalore, the cost of living there is nuts, not much lower than most non-California US cities).
The great thing about working with folks from both India and China is they come from cultures that highly value software developers, and don't seem to have the same problems we do getting women into tech (it's nowhere near 50/50, but it's much better than the US-born crowd).
I think you may miss here the point, safety-wise. What does "guarantee" mean to you? I don't expect Social Security to be there for me, but I do expect my personal investments to be. What's more likely to provide: depending on the government of the future, or owning the means of production?
It's not a matter of free lunch, it's an understanding of how investments are priced. You get lower returns over time by seeking more guaranteed returns. Bonds with a 1% annual change of failing pay much more than 1% more than safe bonds. There's no sane reason to buy 100 safe bonds over 100 slightly worse bonds if your goal is investment returns. The strategy of fixing your tolerance for volatility to your target date works great - you benefit from the higher returns when the volatility doesn't matter, and you pay for the lower volatility when it does, and you come out ahead from the trade-off.
But even the safest investment strategy will put you ahead of what you get from Social Security.
As far as bad funds in 401Ks, sure that happens. I'm no fan of government regulation, but this area needs some standards. A broad-based stock fund (S&P 500, or all stocks, or somesuch) with a management fee below 1/3rd of a percent should be required to be there.
No need for a guarantee. "Target year" funds have a proven track record here, for well-understood reasons (you gradually roll into quality bonds as you approach the target year, so you're not vulnerable to a bad couple of years near retirement). Guarantees are fantastically expensive in investing, like you can have $X guaranteed in 30 years, or a 99% chance of having between $2X and $4X. Any sort of firm guarantee would be gamed and turned into really bad investments being shoved in there: just the wrong approach.
Give people a few choices, like "all stocks, gradually rolling into bonds" and "socially aware stocks, gradually rolling into bonds" or whatever, and set the payroll tax to where the safety net will work out for all those choices by aiming high.
Well, that's certainly my big problem with it. I think a payroll-tax funded 401K would be a vastly better ide, myself (with the government only as the manager selecting the available funds, to ensure it's role as a safety net, but keep the actual money out of their sticky fingers).
Slashdot Mirror
As much as Blizzard lost my fandom with D3, (well, starting with SC2, but D3 was the last straw), I have to applaud them for Adventure Mode and the Bounty system!
I've been saying for a long time now that the post-WoW MMO would need these in a shared world. And sure, the "shared" part is the hard part, but it's good to see a revival of "randomly generate a level, then randomly generate quest-specific content, then modify the level as needed for the content". Back in the era of low-res games, when worlds were big, that idea wasn't rare, but it seems to have vanished.
And, yes, you can do that in an MMO and not have it suck. Sure, random content is often dull, repetitive, and uninvolving, though I'd argue that's just fine for quickly-passed low-level content. But take that same engine, which can generate a random level with some random quest-specific stuff, and make it a tool for world builders. Randomly generate an expansion zone and most of the hours of labor of building that expansion zone is done. Let the world builder focus on the unique elements, the humor and amazing sights and, well, the fun stuff. Take an auto-generated quest and add the creative writing element that makes it interesting, maybe custom design the boss, or maybe write something inspired by how the random boss turned out if that was particularly wild, and done.
You could make a vast and expanding world with new content being cranked out just as fast as the world/quest builders can generate new ideas, by letting a good random content generator provide the starting point and backdrop and all the "flyover country" in a new area.
. Just beause people don't believe in holistic healing, doesn't mean that the standards should be lower.
Yes, there is a burden of proof on the holistic healers to prove their case, but that doesn't make it OK to misrepresent and generaly put up information that's known to be inaccurate as a method of debunking it
This! This is why there were intelligent people on both sides of the evolution "debate" for so long, until the talk.origins FAQ matured (now there's really no excuse). So much BS and known false crap was taught in high school science classes and would turn up in casual searches back when the internet was young, that it was quite easy for someone from a religious background to assume that "evil-ution" was some big scam.
It's only because of the many people on talk.origins who respected the other side as intelligent people, and listened to their arguments that real debunking of the creationist position happened. It turned out that what many people had been taught about evolution (and still are!) was in fact wrong, and they were right to be skeptical of evolution based on what they had been taught. Once some intelligent, adult debate happened back on the place we don't speak of (unsurprisingly, it took a while), people realized that what they really needed to debunk was "bad high school-taught evolution myths", and 99% of skeptics would be convinced by explaining the actual science. (You wouldn't believe some of the BS taught in schools in the US South, apparently sincerely, as the science of evolution.)
For Holistic Nonsense there's a different problem. I don't know what it is, but you can bet there's some equally non-obvious fundamental misunderstandings at work here, and the only way to convince believers in that BS is to understand why they believe it, and address the root of that belief in places like Wikipedia. Calling them stupid won't convince anyone.
How does the Tesla reverse anyway? Given the way Hipsters love it, I assume it's a "fixie" and spins the motor backwards to reverse, but I haven't actually checked.
Sports cars were two seaters. They were not high revving. They just sounded like they were.
Meh, I reject that entirely. There's a word for a 2-seat car: coupe. The Alfa was a roadster, but it was a poser car, a girl's convertible, not a sports car.
I would venture an opinion on whether the TransAm was a sports car, but I try to avoid religious arguments on Slashdot. I get in enough trouble for questioning the AGW religion without bringing on the TransAm fans as well!
Sure, definitions change, but it has always been the case that "sports car == corners well" and "muscle car === accelerates well" The whole concept of muscle cars exists because not all cars that get to 60 fast can turn a corner. A GT car is just a luxury muscle car (or alternatively, a muscle car is a cheap-ass GT car).
For purists, a sports car is a "four wheel motorcycle", open top, high revving small engine, and very light. But for most car magazines, anything built to corner well counted.
And that has what to do with the fact that for a decade every Camry and Taurus had a spoiler from the factory?
Sports cars have the brake and gas pedals close together so that one can heel-and-toe them. Wannabe-sports sedans copy this, for the same marketing reason we were afflicted by spoilers on family sedans for a generation.
Each "standard" has its place, the fault if any of Tesla was in believing their own hype that the Model S was some kind of sports car (hint: when your car's over 2 tons empty, that's not what "sports car" means. GT cruiser maybe, but no one's gonna be heel-and-toeing it through the race track in anything like stock.)
I saw Woz speak a few years ago at a conference, and he was pretty anti-cloud - he says you should own your own data, in your hand, on (ideally) a computer you built and programmed yourself. He's spot on.
You know, chairs built by hand by an individual craftsman really are better than those mass-produced chairs. Funny how price matters. Automation always means some loss of control, but huge gains in cost and repeatability. "It's going to railroad, come railroad time".
Oh, CoH was just plain awesome. So much creativity and fun in the player base, even if many of the quests were half-baked. The feel of playing it was just right. BAM, knocked 6 guys across the room. Tanking 80 guys at once and holding agro until your buddy opens up with his pure-offence class. Sadly, they lost it somewhere, and Champions and the others never really had the same feel.
The problem with Eve is it has the meanest community around. Even by MMO forum standards, Eve is bad. Cool movies of the big battles tho.
PvP can be fun, if the people you play with are nice, but it's not really a substitute for content. What ever happen to first-person games with content, anyhow?
It's possible someone could make an MMO I'd really enjoy. But it wouldn't play anything like WoW. As you say: Blizzard nailed that, no need for another. Let alone 50 clones. While I'm not going to say "it can't be good if it's an MMO", as that is simply unimaginative, no MMO can substitute for a well-plotted single-player fantasy RPG.
Well, I have FF7 now for the PC. Never played a FF game, but I hear good things about 7.
Heck, any give recent FF game is an unlimited number of sequels! Was it FF (or Dragon Age? or both?) that let you script your battles to the point that even the fights were something to watch, not something to do?
You seem very intent on imposing your ideas about how to raise children on other people families. Seems a bit intellectually arrogant to me.
None of that is actually true, is the thing. It's just "they turk our jerbs" nonsense.
Sure, there are some ridiculously exploitive (and already illegal) places with nothing but H1-Bs, being paid next to nothing. The quality of work from those "contractors" is about what you might expect. It's sad they exist, but they are blatantly illegal.
But a big tech companies, pretty much any US public corp, doesn't play those games. Too much to lose by screwing with federal law. The salaries of all H1-B employees is public record (you can't find your co-worker by mane, by you can, by hiring date. Believe me, the salaries get around. And at least in Silly Valley the H1-B workers cost the same as anyone else: salary is a bit less, but when you add lawyer fees for sponsorship it works out. These guys and gals make more than most people outside of California make in the same position.
H1-Bs are simply not a good solution for cheap labor: it doesn't even make sense. It's vastly cheaper to pay the same guy $30K in India than bring him here! You have to bring the best here to retain them. And sure, they concoct job descriptions to hire the guys they've chosen, but not because they're cheap, but because they're the best of the pool and you want to keep those guys.
Give me one reason besides racism why a guy from India who's proven himself good shouldn't be favored over unknown new hires from the US.
My thought is that once you get a face-to-face interview they have already selected you, and the other 5 to 10 candidates, based on their technical skills.
At every large company I've worked at, we've hired about 1/3 of the people brought in for technical interviews. It's all about demonstrating technical ability in person, live, and on the spot, while showing that you don't become a jerk under stress.
People who not only solve the problems (problems that really aren't that hard outside of the time and other pressures), but show passion for doing so tend to get hired. People who "go into geek mode", forget the stress of the interview, and just work with you like is was a design session tend to get hired. People who stress out unduly, lock up, act phony, or for whatever reason don't show "will be OK to work with" tend not to.
I've found the best attitude to show is one of "wow, this is a cool problem, I love coding problems, let's dive in together and solve this". It's hard to fake that, but if that would be your natural reaction outside an interview it can be so in the interview, with a bit of practice.
The problem with being eight years older is that you are, indeed, eight years older. Past a certain age it seems that the only jobs you will be able to get is through your network.
My resume says "20+ years of experience", and I get recruiters contacting me constantly. People want me to help fix the problem in their shops, to be the one doing the morphing, not to be the one needing any sort of molding myself. Or they just want someone who will simply do the job right without needing any supervision - take some of the load off of overworked managers. I've learned that latter is a warning sign - managers should be trying to fix their structural issues when it's that crazy.
In Silicon Valley the average time someone stays a a given job is about 18 months. When I first came there, having had 7 years at my previous job, everyone I interviewed with asked about that as if it were the strangest thing they'd ever seen.
1 year is too short, but a few 1-year jobs followed by longer stays shouldn't bother anyone. You learn the trade faster by changing tech stacks a few times when you're young, in any case.
Where are people getting this? My career didn't start picking up until I was over 35. While I've interviewed at places that didn't actually want a senior engineer (they meant 5-10 years when they wrote "senior"), I blame myself for not asking better questions earlier about those jobs.
Damn straight. Real companies have technical tracks for a full career that don't require management. Nothing beats software development - management is the safe place to stick second-rate coders to limit the arm they can do!
Sure, because racism always elevates the conversation here at /.. Maybe a GNAA post to, to liven things up?
I'm happy to compete with H1-B workers - they have the same costs of living I do, and they'll almost always be sending checks home on top of that. What I can't compete with is that same guy working in India (well, unless it's Bangalore, the cost of living there is nuts, not much lower than most non-California US cities).
The great thing about working with folks from both India and China is they come from cultures that highly value software developers, and don't seem to have the same problems we do getting women into tech (it's nowhere near 50/50, but it's much better than the US-born crowd).
Sure, that's one opinion. But that doesn't mean there's no place for such a product for people with a their own opinion about how to raise their kids.
I think you may miss here the point, safety-wise. What does "guarantee" mean to you? I don't expect Social Security to be there for me, but I do expect my personal investments to be. What's more likely to provide: depending on the government of the future, or owning the means of production?
It's not a matter of free lunch, it's an understanding of how investments are priced. You get lower returns over time by seeking more guaranteed returns. Bonds with a 1% annual change of failing pay much more than 1% more than safe bonds. There's no sane reason to buy 100 safe bonds over 100 slightly worse bonds if your goal is investment returns. The strategy of fixing your tolerance for volatility to your target date works great - you benefit from the higher returns when the volatility doesn't matter, and you pay for the lower volatility when it does, and you come out ahead from the trade-off.
But even the safest investment strategy will put you ahead of what you get from Social Security.
As far as bad funds in 401Ks, sure that happens. I'm no fan of government regulation, but this area needs some standards. A broad-based stock fund (S&P 500, or all stocks, or somesuch) with a management fee below 1/3rd of a percent should be required to be there.
No need for a guarantee. "Target year" funds have a proven track record here, for well-understood reasons (you gradually roll into quality bonds as you approach the target year, so you're not vulnerable to a bad couple of years near retirement). Guarantees are fantastically expensive in investing, like you can have $X guaranteed in 30 years, or a 99% chance of having between $2X and $4X. Any sort of firm guarantee would be gamed and turned into really bad investments being shoved in there: just the wrong approach.
Give people a few choices, like "all stocks, gradually rolling into bonds" and "socially aware stocks, gradually rolling into bonds" or whatever, and set the payroll tax to where the safety net will work out for all those choices by aiming high.
Well, that's certainly my big problem with it. I think a payroll-tax funded 401K would be a vastly better ide, myself (with the government only as the manager selecting the available funds, to ensure it's role as a safety net, but keep the actual money out of their sticky fingers).