Most games (even, say, Black and White which tried to 'break the mold') have LEVELS.
What I want are long games with short LEVELS. I don't mind playing a game for 40 hours if it can consistently fit some goal into an hour or less of gameplay.
That's your target. Can a busy geek complete a level in the time between making dinner and watching prime time TV. Hit that sweet spot, make a million dollars, buy a ferrari.
So you can register whatever you want with my new tld... Say you want... hmmm "slashdotbitesass" that'd be your new tld!
origin slashdotbitesass. 10.10.10.10 A www
woot!
Seriously, why the hell even go through all the trouble for new TLDs. With the possible exception of the utility of.XXX, everyone assumes ".com" when you say a domain name. Even if you say ".net" they try.com
I mean, this post is basically a form question. "Can I use [buzzword] to achieve [unrelated goal]? How can I [verbed noun] my [neologism] to [marketing speak]?"
I'm just waiting for the dupe. Seriously. Where's Jon Katz to ask "If only people would pay attention to Agile Methodologies, they wouldn't have shot all those kids in the face! Agile Methodologies are the unsung heroes of high school!"
Okay, I think needle-head means this.
Looks to me like "Agile Methods" are equivalent to "endless point releases and a never-ending project timeline that sucks up client cash and developer time"
What you really want is a NAS box. Your foolishness about dropping the R-bomb proves your mental inadequacy.
Look for "Snapserver" or, my fave, the Iomega p410u. In a pinch you can netboot it with bigger hard drives, but by default you get >300GB of raid-5 with hot-swap IDE. and with gigabit ethernet, who cares.
I totally agree. When Keuffel and Esser stopped making slide rules, I was stunned. With advances in materials and optics, they could have produced new offerings to compete in the market, but, no, they just quit. People have become too calculator-centric these days, and I guess that tools for engineers take a back seat to popular marketing.
If only Carly Fiorina had stopped thinking about marketing and outsourcing, I wouldn't have to buy used slide rules on eBay.
"Government does not exist to do for the people what the people are unwilling to do for themselves, though many people would like to (and seem to) think."
You know, you're right, and nobody exists just so they can grow the wheat that gets turned into the bread that makes the bun for your big mac. Society is founded, quite simply, on the idea of shared burden. You can promote your Libertarian Utopia all you want, but the idea of Perfect Individualism is tantamount to a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where if you haven't killed it or culled it yourself, you starve. Society starts with "You share with me, I share with you, and when you have more, and you give me more, I return in kind" I'm not promoting communism, here. I'm promoting mere citizenship. The fact that people get so caught up in their own selfish delusions to forget that one simple foundation of SOCIETY, boggles my mind. You may think you can do everything you need to support yourself, but we have a word for that, and it's "hubris".
So, again, social security exists to ensure that society is safe from roving bands of starving geezers grabbing you on the street and phlegmatically demanding that you give them the safety they deserve after working their asses off for fifty years building your roads, buildings, and homes... cooking your meals, raising your children, all at a wage that made it impossible for them to save up for the future. Sure, social security might be expensive for you, now, but in the future, guns will probably still be cheap, and old people might find them a comfort against your selfishness
You're BOTH right. 'target' is allowed in 4.01 loose and _frameset_ (otherwise the frameset DTD would be kind of useless, eh?) but NOT in 4.01 _strict_. So, basically, you can use it if you a) rely on quirks mode b) use the loose DTD or c) use the frameset DTD.
Now, target isn't in the XHTML 1.1 DTD... so you're right back to the issue.
The real problem is that web browsers make horrible application platforms, so people open new windows without navigation, menu, and location controls.
You should only need root-style access to do one thing, and that's restart apache. And if your sysadmin uses, say, iptables/ipfilter, he could just redirect port 80 to some port above 1024 and then you wouldn't even need root at all! Quit whining!
"But Wait!" you say, "What about software upgrades? New Perl modules?" --Sorry, bub, installing and upgrading software is exactly what the sysadmin is there for. These are her systems. Not yours.
It's likely your sysadmin is smarter than you, and has been doing this longer. And while I'm sure you have "teh lunix" at home and run X as root "all the time", that doesn't make you worthy of having root on the universitie's box. Quite frankly, having been through this from the sysadmin's side, No, you don't need root, and it's YOU who's playing the political game, not them. It's their box, their system, their software. The limousine company owns the cadillac, you just drive it around and make sure it has gas. Thank you. Move along!
I was speaking specifically of the obvious Fantastic Four characters. I took that shot before they added UI screen-caps to the game, but I assure you their names matched the comic characters, and their powers were as similar as the game would allow.
The character in that screenshot, on the right, is a character I made based on my own comic book ideas. Technically, if I continued to play that character (I deleted her), I would be unable to create comics based on her as Cryptic would own the rights to the representation. From a legal standpoint, it seems to me their problem is one of rights. They assume rights to in-game content. This isn't, as others have pointed out, Marvel suing Bic (though I'd say something more like "Marvel suing Rotring", just to keep it realistic). This is more like Rotring saying that they own anything you create with their pencils, and then distributing a book of comic-book art with some Marvel fan art in it. Even if they give the book away for free, the art is still an issue.
Back when we were all creating our characters for our Communist supergroup, we had a bit of a back-and-forth with Cryptic over who, exactly, owned our ideas, especially if the characters we used were ideas we wanted to turn into a comic, or based on existing ideas we had used in a comic.
It came down to the EULA which states that your character and all derivations or representations thereof are property of Cryptic and NCSoft. To which I asked pointedly "What about the Fantastic Four?"
This was going to bite them in the ass eventually, as they allege to own everything you create, even if it's not yours to create.
My suspicion, as I've voiced elsewhere, is that they will be required to remove these characters from the game, and pay damages to Marvel, and probably DC and whoever else, in the end.
Then, of course, there's the obvious ownership issue of this guy.
I'd like to expand on what I wrote above. When we started playing, I mentioned to a friend that what I really wanted from an MMORPG like City of Heroes, was the ability to inhabit a place like Kurt Busiek's "Astro City", where normal (and not so normal people) lived out their lives amidst an ever-changing landscape with well-known and active villains and heros. What I was envisioning was a place where not every super-villain showed up inside a door mission, where sometimes an entire part of town face faced with a common peril, and all the heroes had to answer the call of duty, come together, and fight against some great foe, where even dying in the line of fire was worth it just to say "I fought the Kraken when he attacked Pier Cove and ate that oil tanker!" I think what bugged me was the oppresiveness of the mundane in MMORPGs... Not the Level Mill, necessarily, but the fact that you even worry about levels to acheive some goal. I'd prefer that the goal be taking part in some larger shared story, and not getting the next chit on your 'blast the baddies' power*.
So, to that end, I'd ask "What are the game designers doing to bring the players together, to give them a true sense of community and a real stake in the game, instead of giving them a stake in the lesser reward of levelling up for the next power slot or costume change?
(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)
*Part of working on the supergroup I'm in was working towards that, that even if the game offered no great ever-present Hero or Villain, we could fall back on the standard of Freedom versus Oppression, twisted, of course, into the tongue-in-cheek black-sheep-style heroics of being the Hero for the Wrong Side.
Others have asked how to reduce the "Level Grind", but I'd like to get more specific. This Halloween, the wife and I passed up several of the usual assigned door missions, stopped caring about XP, and did nothing but run door to door playing trick-or-treat. I think what appealed to us was that it was not merely a change, but partially a game-within-a-game. It was gambling, with the bonus that we got badges for killing so many pumpkin-headed monsters, and witches, and zombies.
Also, recently, Paragon City was "Attacked" by roving bands of monsters, which was fun, as well as the addition of new zones. Obviously things are being done to help alleviate the feeling of sameness and repetition, but it is unavoidably still there, since there are really only five or six common missions.
My question is, specifically, what other forms of game-play are being contemplated for non-PvP expansion? Will we see more interactivity in the city? Will, perhaps, the very landscape of the existing zones change (It was interesting when I heard that all the lights went out in one Zone when the city was attacked). Will there be opportunities, as there were this halloween, for large groups of people to come together to fight giant, lumbering monsters, and not just beat up the same group of baddies in some abandoned warehouse?
(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)
Wearing a pair of glasses with some vaseline smeared on them gives the world a nice warm, glowing look. Unfocus your eyes for even greater effect! Wear mittens for a warmer feel to everything you touch!
There's a whole world of "swapping fidelity for secondary emotional enhancement" we could go for.
"Taking a promotion or a raise instead of leaving for a new job is usually a bad, bad idea.
They think (know) you're disloyal. When it's time for layoffs, you'll be the first to go.
It's possible they're just giving you a raise to give them time to find
your replacement. Whenever they're ready, you might be out the door
(having passed on your other job offer already).
To use a
poker analogy, managers don't like being check-raised. If you think
this won't effect their professional/personal opinion of you in the
long term, you're wrong.
Most importantly: If you hate the
job enough to look for another one, why would you stay? Is the
raise/promotion really worth it?
"
All I have to say is, sure, go ahead, ask for a promotion. Ask for Money. Ask for Power. Ask them to offer you everything you ask for. The point isn't that you want all of that. The point is: "I want my father back, you sonofabitch!"
You're saying that if I haven't got a symbol for something (or even primitives to build an accurate aggregate symbol with) that leaves me unable to describe the qualities of that thing in the symbolic system I use to describe the world.
Of course. --which is why we have situations like I described above, where we have "electrons" that "orbit" nuclei. They don't really orbit, and in fact, they're nothing like the model they teach you in high school at all. That's why we have the word "but". Most hackers are perfectly aware that language is descriptive, not proscriptive. People who use artificial languages are well aware of the limitations of language, and the necessity for multiple levels of abstraction.
The Piraha just live in a world where descriptive symbols for "seventeen" just never became a necessity. Saying that language shapes thought is tantamount to saying environment shapes our worldview. Language isn't some virus from outer space. It's a malleable part of human experience that we change in response to our world.
Okay rocket scientist, if it's so surprising that people without a word for, say , "five, six, and seven" can't remember exactly whether there were five six or seven marks on a piece of paper, let's try this:
Without counting, or saying any number to yourself, or using a word to describe the concept of quantity, or referring to your fingers, tell me how many X's are on the next line:
X X X X X X
Think about it. You want to count them up to six, then remember "Six" and not remember " X X X X X X". This is the problem with the study. Language is, by definition, symbolic. That' the whole point of it, to not have to remember each experience in its totality, but to be able to share it symbolically with someone, so it is a) easier to remember and b) easier to transfer. Otherwise you'd be telling stories with models and pantomime. Now then, back to our experiment. How many were there? Draw it. See? Much harder than just saying "Six. I see Six X's" (you might have said "two groups of 3 X's", which you HAVE words for, but still, harder than "Six". The problem is that, as describe above, not that language affects how we think, but our vocabulary affects how we are able to recall and describe the world. You can still tell the difference between five X's and six X's... and you may even be able to build up "groupings" by using your own words for things. Does it mean you're not as smart as people who can describe "six"? No, you just are less able to recall and describe parts of the world you don't have words for.
I'm sure some day, aliens will come down and say to us "Electrons do not orbit nuclei, fools! Slithy toves gyre and gimbol in the wabe!" and then laugh into their tentacle-sleeves at us. (apologies to David Gribbin)
Slashdot Mirror
Most games (even, say, Black and White which tried to 'break the mold') have LEVELS.
What I want are long games with short LEVELS. I don't mind playing a game for 40 hours if it can consistently fit some goal into an hour or less of gameplay.
That's your target. Can a busy geek complete a level in the time between making dinner and watching prime time TV. Hit that sweet spot, make a million dollars, buy a ferrari.
So, you want to open-source an OS that features: 1. no user security 2. 16-bit drivers 3. large chunks written in assembler (or do you mean the PowerPC port, eh?) 4. large portions ©Microsoft, Inc 6. A UI written in IBM-style C++ (or, who knows, being IBM, maybe some of it's in SmallTalk) I can't imagine any of it being useful to the open-source community. Their networking stuff mirrors what AIX has, the kernel itself is very specialized and ancient, and the UI technology that is useful is already available through OpenDoc. Part of the problem is that nobody, be it the KDE folks or Gnome, want to do the sort of UI that OS/2 pioneered, the perniciously object-oriented interface of the WPS. Hell, trying to get GNU fiends to code in C++ is well-nigh impossible. I think a better idea would be to start a project to reproduce the effective functionality of the WPS and OpenDoc apps in a UI for X, or, better yet, Y. What they really need to open-source is all the OSs for the Atari ST!
It shall simply be for .
.XXX, everyone assumes ".com" .com
Yeah, you heard me... '.'
So you can register whatever you want with my new tld... Say you want... hmmm "slashdotbitesass"
that'd be your new tld!
origin slashdotbitesass.
10.10.10.10 A www
woot!
Seriously, why the hell even go through all the trouble for new TLDs. With the possible exception of the utility of
when you say a domain name. Even if you say ".net" they try
It's sheer madness!
Fuck Slashdot. It has officially
JUMPED THE SHARK
I mean, this post is basically a form question. "Can I use [buzzword] to achieve [unrelated goal]? How can I [verbed noun] my [neologism] to [marketing speak]?"
I'm just waiting for the dupe. Seriously. Where's Jon Katz to ask "If only people would pay attention to Agile Methodologies, they wouldn't have shot all those kids in the face! Agile Methodologies are the unsung heroes of high school!"
Okay, I think needle-head means this. Looks to me like "Agile Methods" are equivalent to "endless point releases and a never-ending project timeline that sucks up client cash and developer time"
to adjust the shield harmonics of your projects, you could create a feeback loop in their subspace attenuators!
Then... PROFIT!!!!111
It's a planet thing, man... you wouldn't understand
Just keep reading Slashdot until, one by one, your brain cells atrophy and die. Eventually you'......
+++[NO CARRIER]
What you really want is a NAS box. Your foolishness about dropping the R-bomb proves your mental inadequacy.
Look for "Snapserver" or, my fave, the Iomega p410u. In a pinch you can netboot it with bigger hard drives, but by default you get >300GB of raid-5 with hot-swap IDE. and with gigabit ethernet, who cares.
Anyway, for mass storage, get to eBay
(note: yeah, yeah, eBay eats babies)
I totally agree. When Keuffel and Esser stopped making slide rules, I was stunned. With advances in materials and optics, they could have produced new offerings to compete in the market, but, no, they just quit. People have become too calculator-centric these days, and I guess that tools for engineers take a back seat to popular marketing.
If only Carly Fiorina had stopped thinking about marketing and outsourcing, I wouldn't have to buy used slide rules on eBay.
You know, you're right, and nobody exists just so they can grow the wheat that gets turned into the bread that makes the bun for your big mac. Society is founded, quite simply, on the idea of shared burden. You can promote your Libertarian Utopia all you want, but the idea of Perfect Individualism is tantamount to a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, where if you haven't killed it or culled it yourself, you starve. Society starts with "You share with me, I share with you, and when you have more, and you give me more, I return in kind" I'm not promoting communism, here. I'm promoting mere citizenship. The fact that people get so caught up in their own selfish delusions to forget that one simple foundation of SOCIETY, boggles my mind. You may think you can do everything you need to support yourself, but we have a word for that, and it's "hubris".
So, again, social security exists to ensure that society is safe from roving bands of starving geezers grabbing you on the street and phlegmatically demanding that you give them the safety they deserve after working their asses off for fifty years building your roads, buildings, and homes... cooking your meals, raising your children, all at a wage that made it impossible for them to save up for the future. Sure, social security might be expensive for you, now, but in the future, guns will probably still be cheap, and old people might find them a comfort against your selfishness
...asshat
"I'm a good writer"
You're BOTH right. 'target' is allowed in 4.01 loose and _frameset_ (otherwise the frameset DTD would be kind of useless, eh?) but NOT in 4.01 _strict_. So, basically, you can use it if you a) rely on quirks mode b) use the loose DTD or c) use the frameset DTD.
Now, target isn't in the XHTML 1.1 DTD... so you're right back to the issue.
The real problem is that web browsers make horrible application platforms, so people open new windows without navigation, menu, and location controls.
"But Wait!" you say, "What about software upgrades? New Perl modules?" --Sorry, bub, installing and upgrading software is exactly what the sysadmin is there for. These are her systems. Not yours.
It's likely your sysadmin is smarter than you, and has been doing this longer. And while I'm sure you have "teh lunix" at home and run X as root "all the time", that doesn't make you worthy of having root on the universitie's box. Quite frankly, having been through this from the sysadmin's side, No, you don't need root, and it's YOU who's playing the political game, not them. It's their box, their system, their software. The limousine company owns the cadillac, you just drive it around and make sure it has gas. Thank you. Move along!
The character in that screenshot, on the right, is a character I made based on my own comic book ideas. Technically, if I continued to play that character (I deleted her), I would be unable to create comics based on her as Cryptic would own the rights to the representation. From a legal standpoint, it seems to me their problem is one of rights. They assume rights to in-game content. This isn't, as others have pointed out, Marvel suing Bic (though I'd say something more like "Marvel suing Rotring", just to keep it realistic). This is more like Rotring saying that they own anything you create with their pencils, and then distributing a book of comic-book art with some Marvel fan art in it. Even if they give the book away for free, the art is still an issue.
But Van Helsing could destroy a Monster moon, even if batman were on it.
It came down to the EULA which states that your character and all derivations or representations thereof are property of Cryptic and NCSoft. To which I asked pointedly "What about the Fantastic Four?"
This was going to bite them in the ass eventually, as they allege to own everything you create, even if it's not yours to create.
My suspicion, as I've voiced elsewhere, is that they will be required to remove these characters from the game, and pay damages to Marvel, and probably DC and whoever else, in the end.
Then, of course, there's the obvious ownership issue of this guy.
So, to that end, I'd ask "What are the game designers doing to bring the players together, to give them a true sense of community and a real stake in the game, instead of giving them a stake in the lesser reward of levelling up for the next power slot or costume change?
(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)
*Part of working on the supergroup I'm in was working towards that, that even if the game offered no great ever-present Hero or Villain, we could fall back on the standard of Freedom versus Oppression, twisted, of course, into the tongue-in-cheek black-sheep-style heroics of being the Hero for the Wrong Side.
Also, recently, Paragon City was "Attacked" by roving bands of monsters, which was fun, as well as the addition of new zones. Obviously things are being done to help alleviate the feeling of sameness and repetition, but it is unavoidably still there, since there are really only five or six common missions.
My question is, specifically, what other forms of game-play are being contemplated for non-PvP expansion? Will we see more interactivity in the city? Will, perhaps, the very landscape of the existing zones change (It was interesting when I heard that all the lights went out in one Zone when the city was attacked). Will there be opportunities, as there were this halloween, for large groups of people to come together to fight giant, lumbering monsters, and not just beat up the same group of baddies in some abandoned warehouse?
(The Apparatchik, Coalition of Communist Crusaders for the Proletariat)
There's a whole world of "swapping fidelity for secondary emotional enhancement" we could go for.
" All I have to say is, sure, go ahead, ask for a promotion. Ask for Money. Ask for Power. Ask them to offer you everything you ask for. The point isn't that you want all of that. The point is: "I want my father back, you sonofabitch!"
net booting with an XServe
You're saying that if I haven't got a symbol for something (or even primitives to build an accurate aggregate symbol with) that leaves me unable to describe the qualities of that thing in the symbolic system I use to describe the world.
Of course. --which is why we have situations like I described above, where we have "electrons" that "orbit" nuclei. They don't really orbit, and in fact, they're nothing like the model they teach you in high school at all. That's why we have the word "but". Most hackers are perfectly aware that language is descriptive, not proscriptive. People who use artificial languages are well aware of the limitations of language, and the necessity for multiple levels of abstraction.
The Piraha just live in a world where descriptive symbols for "seventeen" just never became a necessity. Saying that language shapes thought is tantamount to saying environment shapes our worldview. Language isn't some virus from outer space. It's a malleable part of human experience that we change in response to our world.
Oops. Double apologies. I meant "John Gribbin"
Without counting, or saying any number to yourself, or using a word to describe the concept of quantity, or referring to your fingers, tell me how many X's are on the next line:
X X X X X X
Think about it. You want to count them up to six, then remember "Six" and not remember " X X X X X X". This is the problem with the study. Language is, by definition, symbolic. That' the whole point of it, to not have to remember each experience in its totality, but to be able to share it symbolically with someone, so it is a) easier to remember and b) easier to transfer. Otherwise you'd be telling stories with models and pantomime. Now then, back to our experiment. How many were there? Draw it. See? Much harder than just saying "Six. I see Six X's" (you might have said "two groups of 3 X's", which you HAVE words for, but still, harder than "Six". The problem is that, as describe above, not that language affects how we think, but our vocabulary affects how we are able to recall and describe the world. You can still tell the difference between five X's and six X's... and you may even be able to build up "groupings" by using your own words for things. Does it mean you're not as smart as people who can describe "six"? No, you just are less able to recall and describe parts of the world you don't have words for.
I'm sure some day, aliens will come down and say to us "Electrons do not orbit nuclei, fools! Slithy toves gyre and gimbol in the wabe!" and then laugh into their tentacle-sleeves at us. (apologies to David Gribbin)