But you have to be able to live in the low cost of living places--you need to be creative to keep your sanity (at times) because there often ain't a whole lot to do there.
I guess the trick is finding some place near to where people will pay you a lot but isolated enough that things are still cheap, try to play Maxwell's Demon to defy the usual high salary / high cost of living tie-in.
That's kind of a microcosm of what India has just started being able to do...w/ telepresence, they can stick arond where it's cheap but "be" where the salaries are better.
you know, a lot of offshore companies end up sending people onshore to help coordinate...the USA must seem hyper-expensive to these people, I wonder if they have to live on their India salaries here, or if there's a cost of living adjustment, or what.
That's really what it all comes down to. I got that from the recent Wired article and this pretty interesting set of responses confirms it.
That's 1/4 of what I was making fresh out of school in 1996.
I guess I don't understand how in a "global economy", that kind of difference in the cost of living survives, and how it ties in with things like inflation and other economic factors.
Is it basically that there are SO many poor people in India, that that somehow keeps the costs of the basics down? And that the USA couldn't have a similar situation without that level of poverty?
Amazing. I wonder what the future of global living standards is going to look like.
I suspect there is a flavor of fun that will only come from the ultimately pointless, trivial, and goofy and that all the good fun from aiding humankind will never quite reproduce.
There's nothing wrong with that conclusion as long as you assume it's not the only correct conclusion.
Two Reasons: -Life should have an element of fun and joy lest it be drab and strictly utilitarian
-your line of thinking can enter into a spiral of nihilism. Oh, so you helped someone? So what, they're going to die anyway. Oh so you helped humanity? So what, we'll still probably kill ourselves en masse. Oh so you helped humanity not kill itself? So what, it all ends in the heat death of the universe anyway. Oh, so you helped find out that the transhumanists are right and we can conquer entropy as a species and achieved virtual godhood? Well, now you're smoking recreational drugs, and thus the circle begins anew.
Better to get your cheerful nihilism on the ground floor, and find a balance between having fun and getting more obviously important things done.
It is interesting how book reading, except maybe "shlock" genres (sci fi according to some people, romances according to others) gets kind of a free pass, always assumed to be a good way of spending time, even though it can take SOOOO long that the cost/benefit ratio might not be there.
I think why this is a worthy "ask slashdot" is that for some, games work on two levels: 1. They're just plain fun. 2. Philisophically, video games are fascinating because they're interactive microcosms. Mini universes that you can play around in and affect changes to...compared to movies and books, we're even if you're very 'engaged' your still not seeing the media itself respond to your engagement, that's really something special.
So when "1", the fun factor, drifts away, gets outwieghed by the pressures and other interests of life, that's a little sad, because the "2" principle is still going strong. New worlds with interesting bosses and lovely levels will show up (and thats just counting the non-innovative games!) but you're not going to be a part of it because of this mundane thing called life.
The trouble is, once you start thinking "gee, games is kind of fun, but not really worthy of my time", you can apply that kind of analysis to almost anything that isn't directly helping the world or pretty much directly earning you money or some such.
For me, a soon to be 30-yr-old, it's all about two things: the time some of these games would like you to consume playing them, and then the increasing difficulty getting people together for the on-the-couch (as opposed to online) multiplayer games that I like so damn much.
Also, games get no respect from the world at large. Even though I'm mostly a social gamer, though I will play through the occasional one player adventure, my soon-to-be-ex-wife cited that as one of the (minor) issues, my devoting hours to gaming, despite her own f***ing introvert need to sometimes burn hours watching the crappiest of movies on TV to unwind/recharge.
Jimminy crickets, it was a valid point (that there's not a lot exciting about these particular, given how distributed and emulated they already are) in a meant to be funny wrapper.
yeah, it's frustrating that after seeing the fun of 2600 Warlords and their earlier 8-bits w/ 4 ports, the 800XL and later 5200 and 7800 stuck with 2, and that generally became the standard for a long time.
Of course, judging by current console sales, 2 w/o multitap is still the standard, stupid stupid Sony......even those earlier systems. 4 controllers is an easy way to make fun games. The game doesn't have to provide as much content; the extra players do it for them! (And in terms of multitap, any system that uses a multitap rather than having 4 ports will have a smaller % of 4 player games than if they had it as part of the hardware.)
Heh, I'm having flashbacks to [A]bort, [R]etry, [F]ail ?
style messages. Looking back, I can kind of guess what's the difference between Abort and Fail (kill the program vs let it go on, hopefully realizing it failed) but man....those really were dark ages of UI
"...will feature top-selling Midway games, including Mortal Kombat, Spy Hunter, Rampage, Joust, Defender I & II, Robotron:2084, Marble Madness, Smash TV, Super Sprint and Paperboy",
Except for Mortal Kombat, which I've hardly seen around, those games are the total sluts of the emulation world. They've been done on more systems than Madonna studying the Kaballah.
Yeah, a checkbox plus 3 buttons is probably better than 5 buttons.
Course, to this Windows'ed guy, it seems like the most action-y, 'positive' button should be to the left, with the "stop all this" button (aka Cancel) to the right, but still
Woa! we have an veteran console designer here! You remind me of that Simpsons episode in which Homero gets to design a car......the 4 controller ports...
Why in hell MS fans are always taking credit away from Nintendo! The four controller ports were first put in a console (AFAIK) for the Nintendo64!
The Gamecube also has this, and the PS2 followed suit pretty soon!
You only need to say that the N5 will be a rebranded Xbox to look like the perfect MS-Troll!
Nimrod, I AM a Nintendo fanboy, first and foremost. All credit to N64 for bringing back 4 controller ports (some old Atari computers used to have, maybe a model of the 5200) and returning the analog stick. Gamecube is the best system out there, but it relies a bit heavily on its franchise (which is why I love it so). But for stuff like online gaming, obviously Microsoft is being more interesting. (They at first ripped off the DC controller, and then kind of got a compromise between it and the Gamecube's...but it's an excellent, very solid feeling controller)
And no, PS2 has never had 4 controller ports.
If I was the perfect MS-Troll, I'd say that there wont BE a N5 at all, that Nintendo is the next Sega...but god, i hope not.
Sorry, duhhr, you're right, no Live support in Halo.
I meant to say is, more games than i expcected support 4 way split screen, even ones that feature Xbox live support. (And really, that's mostly based on my experience w/ Crimson Skies. But I am happy that the 4 controller ports encourages companies to make "party"-able games, unlike the PS2 and its stupid need for a multitap)
Xbox is my third current console (GC first, then PS2) and it has pretty much held its own. (Unlike the PS2, especially now that GTA3 and Vice City are out for Xbox.) I'm sometimes impressed at how many correct decisions they made, the same ones I would have made...the good controller (the smaller remake is the best on the market I think), the 4 controller ports, the way some of their top games support both Xbox Live AND 4 player split screen (Halo and Crimson Skies at least), Xbox live itself...I still think GameCube is my favorite of the three but Microsoft has made a very impressive entry into the market.
"No to all" would be redundant to "Cancel". Both would immediately stop the operation with no further questions.
No it wouldn't be redundant, different behaviors are impled, since it's not "No to ALL files I selected to copy", it's "no to all files with a name collision"
I'm thinking of copying a bunch of files (say, W, X, Y, and Z) into a directory that already has some files with the same name. (say, X and Z)
W copies fine. X brings up that dialog: "Yes"--copy X, copy Y, ask about Z "Yes to all"--copy X, copy Y, copy Z "No"--skip X, copy Y, ask about Z "No to all"--skip X, copy Y, skip Z "Cancel"--skip X, skip Y, skip Z
Now, this is obviously a trivial example, but if you have a large number of files, where you want all the files that were in the source directory but don't want any existing file in the destination directory changed, the assymetry in the dialog is annoying.
Just to totally miss your point... This is what I wrote re: the McVeigh excecution:
Salon article: Judge rules no webcast of McVeigh's execution. Now I'm against the death penalty. But if you're going to go for it, you should really go for it. Don't try to pretend there's some kind of dignity here. Go full tilt for the bread and circuses. If the people demand revenge in cold blood, give it to them! In full color! And Dolby Stereo! On national tv! Really get that "deterence" message out there!
You know, that kind of assymetry shows up a few places in Windows, and it's always annoying.
Like, I think it's a File Replace dialog, "Yes" / "Yes to All" / "No" / "Cancel"
Why is there "No to All"? It's not quite as useful as "Yes to All", but you could easily think of some scenarios where you want to add in new files but don't want to try and overwrite any files that are already there...
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 1
Good points.
I think maybe he doesn't teleport because he's too worried he'll get embedded in rock.
(Or maybe the world in the Matrix is flying through a Matrix solar system in a Matrix galaxy...it would be too tough to calculate all the vectors of the planet, you'd teleport and end up in open space, because the planet 'moved away from you')
There was a funny line in the Adventures of Kavalier and Klay along the lines of "Clark Kent? So obviously the name a jewish guy would pick if he was trying to hide and sound strong and American"
However i believe that in most cases the evidence shows that marketing is effective, but only if it's not facing any counter marketning. Which makes it a Prisoners' Dilema type problem. If neither Coke nor Pepsi advertised they could both save a lot of money and probably not affect their market share much. However if one of them decided to stop advertising and the other didn't, the one without advertising would see a loss of sales, so both companies are "forced" to spend millions (billions?) on advertising. Or, (and I'm not sure if either of us has much solid backing for their opinion,) maybe the Pepsi/Coke "war" isn't quite such a zero-sum game, and that while they're struggling against each other for a larger slice of the pie of all softdrink drinkers, by generating media exposure and getting people to think about drinking refreshment, they're increasing the size of the pie, and more people are drinking soda than would otherwise.
I never really got into it, but I read through a lot of Paranoia source material...I really liked its emphasis on drama based decisions by the GM, or whatever its name was in the game...
Alot of people, myself included, like the TimeSplitters games. The most legitimate complaint I've heard about 'em is sniper mode's control is a bit touchy, you have to do a little "tip tip tip" to get it aimed accurately. Other than that, I find the series very well done.
Slashdot Mirror
But you have to be able to live in the low cost of living places--you need to be creative to keep your sanity (at times) because there often ain't a whole lot to do there.
I guess the trick is finding some place near to where people will pay you a lot but isolated enough that things are still cheap, try to play Maxwell's Demon to defy the usual high salary / high cost of living tie-in.
That's kind of a microcosm of what India has just started being able to do...w/ telepresence, they can stick arond where it's cheap but "be" where the salaries are better.
you know, a lot of offshore companies end up sending people onshore to help coordinate...the USA must seem hyper-expensive to these people, I wonder if they have to live on their India salaries here, or if there's a cost of living adjustment, or what.
If they have access to OUR jobs, then give me access to THEIR cost of living
That's an interesting summary of it in your sig there.
I'm reminded hearing about some people who retire to Mexico. I wonder if you could do the same thing to India, or if there are barriers.
This has been a fun discussion, for instance :-)
$11,000 = a decent middle class life in India.
That's really what it all comes down to. I got that from the recent Wired article and this pretty interesting set of responses confirms it.
That's 1/4 of what I was making fresh out of school in 1996.
I guess I don't understand how in a "global economy", that kind of difference in the cost of living survives, and how it ties in with things like inflation and other economic factors.
Is it basically that there are SO many poor people in India, that that somehow keeps the costs of the basics down? And that the USA couldn't have a similar situation without that level of poverty?
Amazing. I wonder what the future of global living standards is going to look like.
I suspect there is a flavor of fun that will only come from the ultimately pointless, trivial, and goofy and that all the good fun from aiding humankind will never quite reproduce.
There's nothing wrong with that conclusion as long as you assume it's not the only correct conclusion.
Two Reasons:
-Life should have an element of fun and joy lest it be drab and strictly utilitarian
-your line of thinking can enter into a spiral of nihilism. Oh, so you helped someone? So what, they're going to die anyway. Oh so you helped humanity? So what, we'll still probably kill ourselves en masse. Oh so you helped humanity not kill itself? So what, it all ends in the heat death of the universe anyway. Oh, so you helped find out that the transhumanists are right and we can conquer entropy as a species and achieved virtual godhood? Well, now you're smoking recreational drugs, and thus the circle begins anew.
Better to get your cheerful nihilism on the ground floor, and find a balance between having fun and getting more obviously important things done.
It is interesting how book reading, except maybe "shlock" genres (sci fi according to some people, romances according to others) gets kind of a free pass, always assumed to be a good way of spending time, even though it can take SOOOO long that the cost/benefit ratio might not be there.
I think why this is a worthy "ask slashdot" is that for some, games work on two levels: 1. They're just plain fun. 2. Philisophically, video games are fascinating because they're interactive microcosms. Mini universes that you can play around in and affect changes to...compared to movies and books, we're even if you're very 'engaged' your still not seeing the media itself respond to your engagement, that's really something special.
So when "1", the fun factor, drifts away, gets outwieghed by the pressures and other interests of life, that's a little sad, because the "2" principle is still going strong. New worlds with interesting bosses and lovely levels will show up (and thats just counting the non-innovative games!) but you're not going to be a part of it because of this mundane thing called life.
The trouble is, once you start thinking "gee, games is kind of fun, but not really worthy of my time", you can apply that kind of analysis to almost anything that isn't directly helping the world or pretty much directly earning you money or some such.
For me, a soon to be 30-yr-old, it's all about two things: the time some of these games would like you to consume playing them, and then the increasing difficulty getting people together for the on-the-couch (as opposed to online) multiplayer games that I like so damn much.
Also, games get no respect from the world at large. Even though I'm mostly a social gamer, though I will play through the occasional one player adventure, my soon-to-be-ex-wife cited that as one of the (minor) issues, my devoting hours to gaming, despite her own f***ing introvert need to sometimes burn hours watching the crappiest of movies on TV to unwind/recharge.
It was a joke.
Jimminy crickets, it was a valid point (that there's not a lot exciting about these particular, given how distributed and emulated they already are) in a meant to be funny wrapper.
Mods, lighten the hell up.
yeah, it's frustrating that after seeing the fun of 2600 Warlords and their earlier 8-bits w/ 4 ports, the 800XL and later 5200 and 7800 stuck with 2, and that generally became the standard for a long time.
...even those earlier systems. 4 controllers is an easy way to make fun games. The game doesn't have to provide as much content; the extra players do it for them! (And in terms of multitap, any system that uses a multitap rather than having 4 ports will have a smaller % of 4 player games than if they had it as part of the hardware.)
Of course, judging by current console sales, 2 w/o multitap is still the standard, stupid stupid Sony...
Heh, I'm having flashbacks to
[A]bort, [R]etry, [F]ail ?
style messages. Looking back, I can kind of guess what's the difference between Abort and Fail (kill the program vs let it go on, hopefully realizing it failed) but man....those really were dark ages of UI
"...will feature top-selling Midway games, including Mortal Kombat, Spy Hunter, Rampage, Joust, Defender I & II, Robotron:2084, Marble Madness, Smash TV, Super Sprint and Paperboy",
Except for Mortal Kombat, which I've hardly seen around, those games are the total sluts of the emulation world. They've been done on more systems than Madonna studying the Kaballah.
Yeah, a checkbox plus 3 buttons is probably better than 5 buttons.
Course, to this Windows'ed guy, it seems like the most action-y, 'positive' button should be to the left, with the "stop all this" button (aka Cancel) to the right, but still
Woa! we have an veteran console designer here! You remind me of that Simpsons episode in which Homero gets to design a car... ...the 4 controller ports...
Why in hell MS fans are always taking credit away from Nintendo! The four controller ports were first put in a console (AFAIK) for the Nintendo64!
The Gamecube also has this, and the PS2 followed suit pretty soon!
You only need to say that the N5 will be a rebranded Xbox to look like the perfect MS-Troll!
Nimrod, I AM a Nintendo fanboy, first and foremost. All credit to N64 for bringing back 4 controller ports (some old Atari computers used to have, maybe a model of the 5200) and returning the analog stick. Gamecube is the best system out there, but it relies a bit heavily on its franchise (which is why I love it so). But for stuff like online gaming, obviously Microsoft is being more interesting. (They at first ripped off the DC controller, and then kind of got a compromise between it and the Gamecube's...but it's an excellent, very solid feeling controller)
And no, PS2 has never had 4 controller ports.
If I was the perfect MS-Troll, I'd say that there wont BE a N5 at all, that Nintendo is the next Sega...but god, i hope not.
Sorry, duhhr, you're right, no Live support in Halo.
I meant to say is, more games than i expcected support 4 way split screen, even ones that feature Xbox live support. (And really, that's mostly based on my experience w/ Crimson Skies. But I am happy that the 4 controller ports encourages companies to make "party"-able games, unlike the PS2 and its stupid need for a multitap)
Xbox is my third current console (GC first, then PS2) and it has pretty much held its own. (Unlike the PS2, especially now that GTA3 and Vice City are out for Xbox.) I'm sometimes impressed at how many correct decisions they made, the same ones I would have made...the good controller (the smaller remake is the best on the market I think), the 4 controller ports, the way some of their top games support both Xbox Live AND 4 player split screen (Halo and Crimson Skies at least), Xbox live itself...I still think GameCube is my favorite of the three but Microsoft has made a very impressive entry into the market.
"No to all" would be redundant to "Cancel". Both would immediately stop the operation with no further questions.
No it wouldn't be redundant, different behaviors are impled, since it's not "No to ALL files I selected to copy", it's "no to all files with a name collision"
I'm thinking of copying a bunch of files (say, W, X, Y, and Z) into a directory that already has some files with the same name. (say, X and Z)
W copies fine.
X brings up that dialog:
"Yes"--copy X, copy Y, ask about Z
"Yes to all"--copy X, copy Y, copy Z
"No"--skip X, copy Y, ask about Z
"No to all"--skip X, copy Y, skip Z
"Cancel"--skip X, skip Y, skip Z
Now, this is obviously a trivial example, but if you have a large number of files, where you want all the files that were in the source directory but don't want any existing file in the destination directory changed, the assymetry in the dialog is annoying.
Just to totally miss your point...
This is what I wrote re: the McVeigh excecution:
Salon article: Judge rules no webcast of McVeigh's execution. Now I'm against the death penalty. But if you're going to go for it, you should really go for it. Don't try to pretend there's some kind of dignity here. Go full tilt for the bread and circuses. If the people demand revenge in cold blood, give it to them! In full color! And Dolby Stereo! On national tv! Really get that "deterence" message out there!
You know, that kind of assymetry shows up a few places in Windows, and it's always annoying.
Like, I think it's a File Replace dialog, "Yes" / "Yes to All" / "No" / "Cancel"
Why is there "No to All"? It's not quite as useful as "Yes to All", but you could easily think of some scenarios where you want to add in new files but don't want to try and overwrite any files that are already there...
Good points.
I think maybe he doesn't teleport because he's too worried he'll get embedded in rock.
(Or maybe the world in the Matrix is flying through a Matrix solar system in a Matrix galaxy...it would be too tough to calculate all the vectors of the planet, you'd teleport and end up in open space, because the planet 'moved away from you')
There was a funny line in the Adventures of Kavalier and Klay along the lines of "Clark Kent? So obviously the name a jewish guy would pick if he was trying to hide and sound strong and American"
great book.
However i believe that in most cases the evidence shows that marketing is effective, but only if it's not facing any counter marketning. Which makes it a Prisoners' Dilema type problem. If neither Coke nor Pepsi advertised they could both save a lot of money and probably not affect their market share much. However if one of them decided to stop advertising and the other didn't, the one without advertising would see a loss of sales, so both companies are "forced" to spend millions (billions?) on advertising.
Or, (and I'm not sure if either of us has much solid backing for their opinion,) maybe the Pepsi/Coke "war" isn't quite such a zero-sum game, and that while they're struggling against each other for a larger slice of the pie of all softdrink drinkers, by generating media exposure and getting people to think about drinking refreshment, they're increasing the size of the pie, and more people are drinking soda than would otherwise.
I never really got into it, but I read through a lot of Paranoia source material...I really liked its emphasis on drama based decisions by the GM, or whatever its name was in the game...
Alot of people, myself included, like the TimeSplitters games. The most legitimate complaint I've heard about 'em is sniper mode's control is a bit touchy, you have to do a little "tip tip tip" to get it aimed accurately. Other than that, I find the series very well done.