Would that really be that much work? Call it's "Royal Adventure" or some such....change the character names, and be done with it. There's nothing that prevents them from making a Sierra "like" adventure game. I've always been mystified when some fan group works for years to build a game and gives up over a C&D because they are obviously violating the IP of the holder. Don't drop the project! Just change the particulars!
This sounds similar to Starlight, which the NSA uses for all kinds of "connect the dots" type intelligence activities.
In my experience Palantir has a lot to offer. But Starlight is definitely the more powerful tool. I've even seen cases where Starlight handled all of the data processing and analysis work before it was fed into Palantir since it's capabilities where so much better.
I've had really good success using an information visualization tool called Starlight on a number of projects like this. Everything from process modeling to military intelligence. It's a commercial spin-out from the DOE PNL lab information visualization research in Washington State.
The solution to this is easy. Do what I do. Wear the suit. Any..and I mean any task that require you to do something that is unbecoming for anyone wearing a suit just doesn't get done. When your boss confronts you to findout why it wasn't done...flash your tie and answer. e.g. "I couldn't shred those papers for you because my tie creates a safety hazard." or "I couldn't run those cables because the carpet may damage my suit pants." Or if you like, use this template, "I couldn't because." The important key to this is to act like the boss is crazy for even considering making you do something like that. That gives him only two choices, go back to your older more reasonable mode of dress (victory!) or get promoted to a position for which a suit is reasonable dress (victory!).
After seeing a war rise up over my page on wikipedia (look up tracker and list of well known trackers and the find Mark Sanders) I completely agree with this. I know the author of the submission and he is flaming pissed with the other editors. People who obviously know little to nothing about the demoscene, trackers or "trackers" are making editing decisions. While the author of the submission is an expert on the scene and is having to fight to even keep the article up. wikipedia is essentially worthless to post on unless you have worked your way into the inner-sanctum of editors.
I find it too bad to still see so many on the tracks of faulty and damaging prescriptive grammar proselytizing. It's like pushing a failed political ideology long after such an ideology has proven itself untenable (Communists, please raise your hands, yes you know who you are). Anecdotal experience has shown that most prescriptive grammarians don't even know the source of their beloved rules. Allow me to enlighten.
Most rules of proper English usage and spelling were developed during the 1600s to 1700s. The need to do this stemmed partially from the understandable need for a consolidating influence on the many various dialects (yes I said dialects) of the English language. It is instructive to look at the roughly comparable example of the Chinese Empire. When the Chinese faced the problem of spreading official law and philosophy throughout polyglot masses, they realized they could never force every citizen to abandon their perfectly functional native tongue for the "Emperor's own". Instead they enforced what they could, writing. They codified and standardized their ideograms and learned people used the official imperial version of the script. Even if the local populace used words differently in their dialect from the written form, it was considered proper and correct to write one way and speak another. Because of China's vast influence throughout Asia, the remnants of this system of education and learning are still with us. The Japanese still use Kanji, Koreans have Hanja and until the French introduced a heavily modified Latin based system, the Vietnamese used Hantu. Now, this analogy is a bit loose, but more or less accurate.
The solution was to thus model English grammar on the language of the West's version of China, the language of the Romans -- Latin! Yes, that is correct, Latin. A few language busybodies (such as Bishop Robert Lowth ) had the bright idea that we should take principles from Latin grammar and apply them to a largely Germanic language. This is why we have rules fraught with so many errors and awkward "sounding" results. Most people of decent linguistic education laugh at these rules when they are brought up under such flags as "correct English" or "proper usage". This aged and archaic Enlightenment linguistic philosophy has resulted in such preposterous and often humorous rules such as: "don't split an infinitive", "don't end a sentence with a preposition", etc. Creating rules for one language based on rules for another is akin to throwing a woman in a river to see if she is a witch.
Due to the same group of ignorant prescriptivists (http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/writin g/grammar.html), spelling in turn became a complete disaster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling). I personally attribute much of the awkwardness of modern English spelling to the stubborn refusal of prescriptivists to introduce a letter for the schwa sound (which FYI is statistically the single most common vowel sound in the English language yet we do not have a single letter for it). Every vowel is at some point used as a placeholder for the schwa sound in unstressed syllables. Ask yourself sometime what the homophonic overlap is between any two vowels (I mean, common, the letter "o" in "women" has the same sound as "i" in "is" for goodness sake!).
That's just for the vowels! English consonants are an absolute disaster. There are many reasons for this, most often attributed to the incredible number of loan words in the English lexicon and the representation the source languages uses for those sounds. Even more distressing are the wide variety of representations for common homophones. Take for example the common construct "ough". Let's play a game and see how many different sounds "ough" can represent: "cough", "rough", "through"
After High School I was pretty burnt-out and didn't even bother with the SATs. After working dead-end jobs for a few years I enrolled in Community College, took all my remedial classes again and worked my way up to a couple A.S. degrees, x-fered to a local state university and finished up my B.S. in C.S. Along the way picked up numerous memberships and affiliations in honor societies and technical consortiums, oh and a summa cum laude etc. etc. Long story short, I now run a large training program for a massive part of the government and work for a $2bil/yr company. I'm in the queue now for my forth promotion in 2 years (a company record!).
Some of my colleagues went to top-tier schools and what I found was that, generally speaking, they started at a slightly higher position than those from lower-tier schools. However, long run I found that the slow starters often made up for and eventually exceeded those other colleagues (such as myself). Chalk it up to psychological need to prove themselves through hardword vs. the top-tier folks resting on their degrees or what have you. But I've found that after 4-6 years it really doesn't make a big difference except in one critical area - Community college was a steal, and because of my ultra-high GPA going into my last 2 years at university I got grants that were large enough to cover the modest tuition that state schools charge vs. private and other such top-tier schools. In otherwords my school is paid off. Done. 100% profit. While my colleagues have $100-$250k to pay off in student loans. While they live in rent controlled apartments, I bought a house and two new cars. While they can't even think about grad school because they can't afford to stop working to think about such a program. I'm preparing to go to one of the top schools in the nation for my chosen graduate field without breaking the bank.
Being in charge of the program I often interview new hires. The hiring committee and I often take this approach to evaluating the worth of degrees: 1)If they went to a top-tier school, but didn't necessarily major in a field that school is known for..i.e. C.S. Degree from Havard. Poli-Sci degree from MIT....in the trash pile. They obviously went for the name recognition. We don't want those types of shameless self promoters on our team. In fact given the incredible expense of those schools, one can generally sum up those types as masochists who will do anything to get ahead. Not an ideal candidate. 2)If the school was well known for their major then they get some bonus points. Let's face it...some schools really are that good for those fields. i.e. Harvard Law, MIT C.S., Tufts for I.R. Caltech for Phys. etc. etc. However, GPA really matters. It's still possible to blow a load of cash on a name school and coast through with enough to graduate. I have several case studies doing lackluster work in my office who were hired by other divisions based on name recognition and several who have been fired for said performance. 3)Unknown schools/lesser known schools. We talk to them about their program of study to determine if it was rigorous enough and diversified enough (we do like to see C.S. majors taking an extra semester of English or Poly-Sci students taking calculus based physics for their lab science req.) GPA means *alot*. If you couldn't manage better than a 3.3-3.4 in your chosen field of study, why should we hire you to do that same level of work in the application of that education? 4)All others...trash pile. 5)In a few rare cases we do look at people who do not have degrees if they have copious amounts of other types of experience. Speak 4 languages fluently and designed a new sorting algorithm? We'll talk. We generally use this equivalency. 5-7 years experience = B.A. 6-10 years = B.S. 13-18 = M.A. 15-20=M.S. Usually the M.A./M.S. position are usually filled by somebody with those years of experience and a B.S. We will never put somebody into a Ph.D. level position without a Ph.D. no matter their experience.
This may sound elitist or harsh but no business can afford to keep underperformers on their payroll.
Why not? I can see it now, we could hire an entire country, say....Belgium to start erecting skyscrapers all over the place (often without regard as to where it is) so for example Kansas could end up with a 9 day skyscraper in the middle of a corn field. Just imagine in a year or so we could have around 40 new Empire State Building class buildings around my house.
Try
"The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of" by
Thomas M. Disch, It's a good read and really covers almost the entire spectrum of Sci-Fi and most of the important authors/novels etc. Well referenced and labeled. Maybe a good companion book for the course to go along with the regular readings.
Slashdot Mirror
http://elblancoswhitespace.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-man-of-steel-meta-reviewreview.html
Short answer, there's a massive disconnect between the critics and the audience on this one.
Would that really be that much work? Call it's "Royal Adventure" or some such....change the character names, and be done with it. There's nothing that prevents them from making a Sierra "like" adventure game. I've always been mystified when some fan group works for years to build a game and gives up over a C&D because they are obviously violating the IP of the holder. Don't drop the project! Just change the particulars!
This sounds similar to Starlight, which the NSA uses for all kinds of "connect the dots" type intelligence activities.
In my experience Palantir has a lot to offer. But Starlight is definitely the more powerful tool. I've even seen cases where Starlight handled all of the data processing and analysis work before it was fed into Palantir since it's capabilities where so much better.
I'm watching it right now on Hulu...
Great, the mice of NIMH will be escaping to the rose bush in 3...2...1...
I've had really good success using an information visualization tool called Starlight on a number of projects like this. Everything from process modeling to military intelligence. It's a commercial spin-out from the DOE PNL lab information visualization research in Washington State.
http://www.futurepointsystems.com/
You know, it's funny. Mental illness is often identified in individuals who claim the rest of the world is crazy and they are the only sane ones.
Victory indeed.
The solution to this is easy. Do what I do. Wear the suit. Any..and I mean any task that require you to do something that is unbecoming for anyone wearing a suit just doesn't get done. When your boss confronts you to findout why it wasn't done...flash your tie and answer. e.g. "I couldn't shred those papers for you because my tie creates a safety hazard." or "I couldn't run those cables because the carpet may damage my suit pants." Or if you like, use this template, "I couldn't because ." The important key to this is to act like the boss is crazy for even considering making you do something like that. That gives him only two choices, go back to your older more reasonable mode of dress (victory!) or get promoted to a position for which a suit is reasonable dress (victory!).
After seeing a war rise up over my page on wikipedia (look up tracker and list of well known trackers and the find Mark Sanders) I completely agree with this. I know the author of the submission and he is flaming pissed with the other editors. People who obviously know little to nothing about the demoscene, trackers or "trackers" are making editing decisions. While the author of the submission is an expert on the scene and is having to fight to even keep the article up. wikipedia is essentially worthless to post on unless you have worked your way into the inner-sanctum of editors.
That's the biggest crock of bullshit I've ever heard. Freedom is earned not dictated.
I find it too bad to still see so many on the tracks of faulty and damaging prescriptive grammar proselytizing. It's like pushing a failed political ideology long after such an ideology has proven itself untenable (Communists, please raise your hands, yes you know who you are). Anecdotal experience has shown that most prescriptive grammarians don't even know the source of their beloved rules. Allow me to enlighten. Most rules of proper English usage and spelling were developed during the 1600s to 1700s. The need to do this stemmed partially from the understandable need for a consolidating influence on the many various dialects (yes I said dialects) of the English language. It is instructive to look at the roughly comparable example of the Chinese Empire. When the Chinese faced the problem of spreading official law and philosophy throughout polyglot masses, they realized they could never force every citizen to abandon their perfectly functional native tongue for the "Emperor's own". Instead they enforced what they could, writing. They codified and standardized their ideograms and learned people used the official imperial version of the script. Even if the local populace used words differently in their dialect from the written form, it was considered proper and correct to write one way and speak another. Because of China's vast influence throughout Asia, the remnants of this system of education and learning are still with us. The Japanese still use Kanji, Koreans have Hanja and until the French introduced a heavily modified Latin based system, the Vietnamese used Hantu. Now, this analogy is a bit loose, but more or less accurate. The solution was to thus model English grammar on the language of the West's version of China, the language of the Romans -- Latin! Yes, that is correct, Latin. A few language busybodies (such as Bishop Robert Lowth ) had the bright idea that we should take principles from Latin grammar and apply them to a largely Germanic language. This is why we have rules fraught with so many errors and awkward "sounding" results. Most people of decent linguistic education laugh at these rules when they are brought up under such flags as "correct English" or "proper usage". This aged and archaic Enlightenment linguistic philosophy has resulted in such preposterous and often humorous rules such as: "don't split an infinitive", "don't end a sentence with a preposition", etc. Creating rules for one language based on rules for another is akin to throwing a woman in a river to see if she is a witch. Due to the same group of ignorant prescriptivists (http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/writin g/grammar.html), spelling in turn became a complete disaster (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_spelling). I personally attribute much of the awkwardness of modern English spelling to the stubborn refusal of prescriptivists to introduce a letter for the schwa sound (which FYI is statistically the single most common vowel sound in the English language yet we do not have a single letter for it). Every vowel is at some point used as a placeholder for the schwa sound in unstressed syllables. Ask yourself sometime what the homophonic overlap is between any two vowels (I mean, common, the letter "o" in "women" has the same sound as "i" in "is" for goodness sake!). That's just for the vowels! English consonants are an absolute disaster. There are many reasons for this, most often attributed to the incredible number of loan words in the English lexicon and the representation the source languages uses for those sounds. Even more distressing are the wide variety of representations for common homophones. Take for example the common construct "ough". Let's play a game and see how many different sounds "ough" can represent: "cough", "rough", "through"
After High School I was pretty burnt-out and didn't even bother with the SATs. After working dead-end jobs for a few years I enrolled in Community College, took all my remedial classes again and worked my way up to a couple A.S. degrees, x-fered to a local state university and finished up my B.S. in C.S. Along the way picked up numerous memberships and affiliations in honor societies and technical consortiums, oh and a summa cum laude etc. etc. Long story short, I now run a large training program for a massive part of the government and work for a $2bil/yr company. I'm in the queue now for my forth promotion in 2 years (a company record!).
Some of my colleagues went to top-tier schools and what I found was that, generally speaking, they started at a slightly higher position than those from lower-tier schools. However, long run I found that the slow starters often made up for and eventually exceeded those other colleagues (such as myself). Chalk it up to psychological need to prove themselves through hardword vs. the top-tier folks resting on their degrees or what have you. But I've found that after 4-6 years it really doesn't make a big difference except in one critical area - Community college was a steal, and because of my ultra-high GPA going into my last 2 years at university I got grants that were large enough to cover the modest tuition that state schools charge vs. private and other such top-tier schools. In otherwords my school is paid off. Done. 100% profit. While my colleagues have $100-$250k to pay off in student loans. While they live in rent controlled apartments, I bought a house and two new cars. While they can't even think about grad school because they can't afford to stop working to think about such a program. I'm preparing to go to one of the top schools in the nation for my chosen graduate field without breaking the bank.
Being in charge of the program I often interview new hires. The hiring committee and I often take this approach to evaluating the worth of degrees:
1)If they went to a top-tier school, but didn't necessarily major in a field that school is known for..i.e. C.S. Degree from Havard. Poli-Sci degree from MIT....in the trash pile. They obviously went for the name recognition. We don't want those types of shameless self promoters on our team. In fact given the incredible expense of those schools, one can generally sum up those types as masochists who will do anything to get ahead. Not an ideal candidate.
2)If the school was well known for their major then they get some bonus points. Let's face it...some schools really are that good for those fields. i.e. Harvard Law, MIT C.S., Tufts for I.R. Caltech for Phys. etc. etc. However, GPA really matters. It's still possible to blow a load of cash on a name school and coast through with enough to graduate. I have several case studies doing lackluster work in my office who were hired by other divisions based on name recognition and several who have been fired for said performance.
3)Unknown schools/lesser known schools. We talk to them about their program of study to determine if it was rigorous enough and diversified enough (we do like to see C.S. majors taking an extra semester of English or Poly-Sci students taking calculus based physics for their lab science req.) GPA means *alot*. If you couldn't manage better than a 3.3-3.4 in your chosen field of study, why should we hire you to do that same level of work in the application of that education?
4)All others...trash pile.
5)In a few rare cases we do look at people who do not have degrees if they have copious amounts of other types of experience. Speak 4 languages fluently and designed a new sorting algorithm? We'll talk. We generally use this equivalency. 5-7 years experience = B.A. 6-10 years = B.S. 13-18 = M.A. 15-20=M.S. Usually the M.A./M.S. position are usually filled by somebody with those years of experience and a B.S. We will never put somebody into a Ph.D. level position without a Ph.D. no matter their experience.
This may sound elitist or harsh but no business can afford to keep underperformers on their payroll.
Why not? I can see it now, we could hire an entire country, say....Belgium to start erecting skyscrapers all over the place (often without regard as to where it is) so for example Kansas could end up with a 9 day skyscraper in the middle of a corn field. Just imagine in a year or so we could have around 40 new Empire State Building class buildings around my house.
Try
"The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of" by
Thomas M. Disch, It's a good read and really covers almost the entire spectrum of Sci-Fi and most of the important authors/novels etc. Well referenced and labeled. Maybe a good companion book for the course to go along with the regular readings.