being offered for download via bittorrent. World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online, both major MMORPGs are are distributing their client software via Bittorrent.
There is a rather large difference between stating something "begins to moves us away from" and stating it "completely disproves" it. It is quite impossible to falsify the proposition that some definition of the soul may exist. No scientist could rationally claim otherwise.
However, as our scientific understanding of a phenomenon grows, it naturally replaces the earlier, superstitious myths that sought to explain it. This is not to say that those myths are completely without value. They may indeed "help countless millions cope with their lives", but that does not give them scientific merit, nor elevate them above the status of "imagination".
" mean sure Bow, Nigger was an interesting read, but it didn't actually tell me anything useful about the game"
Besides being a gripping read, Bow, Nigger conveyed to me exactly the information that would help me make a good choice buying this game. Specifically, I buy a game if I think that it will have a long life on my hard drive, and that means multiplayer. Through the course of the interesting narrative, the author touched on the mechanics of the game and the quality of the effects. But, more importantly, he conveyed the intangibles that are absent in any standard game review I've seen before. After reading the story I felt a sense of how the game actually plays, as well as a sense of its online community.
I'm searching now, in another window, for a copy of JKII on ebay, since I passed over this title when it was released.
"Oh yes. One thing I know that the United States did before the war was to use the Internet to communicate directly with Iraqi soldiers and to send personalised messages saying, 'We're about to invade. We're going to overwhelm you and if you resist us we're going to kill you. But we don't want to do that. So really the best thing for you to do when we invade is to go home'. Each senior officer of the Iraqi army got that message and most of them went home."
" I wish I had a link to an article I once read that was prepared by a psychology student which compared MMORPGS to positive re-enforcement (or some such..) It made perfect sense as to why these games are addictive and why companies design them that way."
Here you go... See "Ariadne" and the end of "Norrathian Scrolls".
"If you play for 13 hours straight, eating while you play over a saturday night because nothing better is going on or you're going through a social life slump"
The opportunity cost of those 13 hours is in itself a "negative consequence". The time could have been spent in activities which can ameliorate, rather than reinforce a "social life slump". Withdrawal from society has a tendency to exacerbate such conditions.
is the simulation of progression achieved by obtaining levels and items through playing the game. When a person perceives progression, i.e. the sense that he is a "little bit better off", the brain gets a little dose of serotonin. Its evolution's way of rewarding the industrious, and what motivates you to work hard, clean your room etc. It is the same dynamic that is at the root of gambling addiction.
"Ordinary" games such as first-person-shooters provide this sense of progression to a lesser degree. The more you play the better you get and when you perceive the progress you get your serotonin rush. However, after a while you get tired or hungry, your performance suffers and ends the reward of continued play. MMORPGS are less skill-intensive and continue to reward the player for button-mashing until they can no longer keep their eyes open.
The community of MMORPG players can also reinforce this addiction, by providing a surrogate to a "real life" community, thus making it easier to withdraw from personal contacts and harder to start them up again. Cults use much the same technique to make it difficult for members to leave and rejoin the larger community.
I question why you think that justifies the blood of 10,000 innocent people on our hands. Is it your argument that Saddam Hussein would have slain 10,000 more people in this time period? The only likely target for such activity, the Kurds, were being protected from such by our no-fly zone.
Revenge on Saddam for murdering innocents, simply does not justify our own murder of innocents. Perhaps, if the fantasies of Iraq as a shining bulwark of freedom and democracy were to be realized it would be worthwhile. But the reality is that we are looking at ongoing bloodshed, and a pending civil war bloodbath worse than the inhumane and barbaric regime we cast down.
was originally conceived as an introduction to Speaker for the Dead, and reads like it. Ender's Game (the book, not the novella) was largely created to serve as an introduction to Speaker for the Dead, and is incomplete without it. Speaker truly ends the story with symmetry, Ender having turned his power of understanding to the nurturing of life rather than its destruction.
The final sentence of Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest I have read in any genre.
"The sunlight on her back, the breeze against her wings, the water cool under her feet, her eggs warming and maturing in the flesh of the cabra: Life, so long waited for, and not until today could she be sure that she would be, not the last of her tribe, but the first."
I download tons of realaudio, convert it to mp3 and play it on my portables. This American Life is always the first thing I listen to. Simply the best radio show in existence, though I don't much like the David Sedaris segments.
Joe Frank is good too.
is about as simple as it gets, and since she is on a windows PC it can actually be useful right away. Start her off with a script that backs up her important files, compresses and writes them to CD. Teach her to add directories to this script, and explain the hierarchical file structure.
Then find out if she performs any other repetitive tasks and help her automate them.
that these worms spread. No kidding, I was just at a TS2 seminar (4 hour sales pitch you sit through to get free software, I skipped out after two). The microsoft rep had a powerpoint slide talking about the latest wave of worms and, one of the bullet points said that it was a social engineering problem not software security because the recipient runs the attachment.
But the bullet point that made me spit up my drink was: "Spread by Unix email servers".
Frankly, I think playing a MMORPG and using the phone or Voice Over IP, offers more of a shared experience than watching a movie/tv together (although it's seriously disadvantaged in the snuggling area;). I was in the exact same situation 7 years ago as the original poster and it worked out great for me. We now have side by side computer workstations and game together.
A side benefit: She was a casual gamer at most when we met (I used to rib her for playing solitaire). But now look at her! My only complaint is that now she hogs all my bandwidth.
"Then Iluvatar spoke, and he said: `Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar , those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.
"And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory."
-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I have trouble understanding the attitude of Tolkien fans who seem unhappy with Jackson's work.
Do you really imagine that a more faithful adaptation could be realized? I don't.
Understand that it is the extended editions which are the true versions for the Tolkien fan. The theatrical versions are far too choppy. But I simply cannot relate to any so-called Tolkien fan who does not appreciate the enormity of the task of bringing these books to life, and how it was done with such artistry, care and respect for the original work. Watch the extended commentary, and you may understand that some deviations, while you may not like them, were intended to further convey the themes of the books.
Perhaps because I have read (and reread) so much of the underlying Middle-Earth material published posthumously by Tolkien's son, I have come to view the stories of Middle-Earth as dynamic, evolving over time like an oral tradition. Tolkien described them in this way also. Thus this latest evolution is perhaps less shocking than reading Tolkien's earlier stories, with Sauron as a giant cat, or later King of Werewolves. It is clear to me that some of this earlier material is drawn on in the movie, as for example the romance of Arwen and Aragorn has taken on much of the flavor of the tale of Beren and Luthien.
The key thing is that the movies are true to the themes of the books, and capture the many-layered complexity of Tolkien's masterpiece. Changes to the narrative are forgiveable, and doubly so when you understand that they are intended to convey facets of the characters which the reader fully recognizes.
I *DID* dislike that Gollum was "pushed" by Frodo into the lava instead of falling in by his own greed and carelessness. In the end, on film he wasn't the victim of his addiction as it should have been portrayed. Even the Rankin/Bass version got THAT part right.
I saw it twice, and I'm fairly certain that Gollum wasn't pushed. He was dancing about with glee at recovering "his precious" just as in the book.
I agree with you completely about Denethor. Its really the only grievance I have left about the movies. Every other complaint I had (and I was seriously unhappy with the Two Towers theatrical version) has been mollified by the extended versions. In the extended editions, deviations like Aragorn's fall, and Faramir's Osgiliath make much more sense and flow better. In nearly every case I found that, while the movies departed from the narrative of the book, the purpose was usually to reveal some facet of the characters that was true to the book, such as Aragorn's facility with animals, or Faramir's conflicted sense of duty.
I'm quite confident that Denethor's character will be much more developed in the Extended RotK.
"At work, *nix dev boxes are locked down almost as tightly production systems. This way, the developers know what kind of permissions their code will have when t is deployed in production."
That's what the test environment is for. I'll throw out another reason why it can help to relax security on dev boxes. Programming in a business environment I have often been faced with problems that result from incorrectly configured supporting software, such as database engines or OS utilities. The programmer's task is to make something work, and being a mechanic with a lock on the toolbox will really make you pull your hair out. I know, I've been there.
Someone earlier compared programming to flipping burgers. I've always harbored somewhat the same thought about system admins, but the truth is that either profession can be approached with mediocrity or excellence. In an ideal world, all systems are perfectly configured, and a programmer can deal purely with code. In my world, programming is often an excercise in learning to properly configure the system itself, and then instructing/persuading the system administrators to do so. The test environment is a good place for this sort of reconciliation between the demands of the development process, and those of the production environment to occur. Testing is a documented event, and the issues that arise will quickly demonstrate whether the developer is playing too fast and loose on the dev boxes, or if the administration is incompetent.
That's about the first mainstream media article, abc no less, that I've seen really accurately describe a computer subculture. He's dead on, too. The reason I don't watch any TV anymore is because computer gaming has filled up that entertainment space.
Really didn't see any mistakes in the article, except maybe implying that 100 people could play on the same server at the same time.
More likely they're just driven insane by having to wait on the other person
Exactly. If skill transfer is the goal, there are much more efficient ways of going about it. Personally, I am a blindingly fast typist, and I do my best developing in sort of a flow state where I am coding nonsequentially and moving around within the environment with the agility of a video game.
I don't see achieving this in a pairs environment.
On the flip side, I learn best by starting with a well designed, fully realized and functional product, cloning it and modifying it to do something else. Some explanation and documentation from the developer is always great, but there is nothing like reading good code. Trying to communicate code via speech is just a recipe for frustration, not efficient learning.
I've purchased about one flash mp3 player a year or so since the first Rio came out. Three rio's, the short-lived intel pocketconcert, and two Bantam BA-350's (great player). They tend to last me about a year to two years and then begin shorting out.
I wind up disassembling them to figure out what went wrong when they start shorting out.. Its usually one of the following:
-Moisture damage (I'm a heavy gym and running user, sweat drips down the headphone cord)
-Breakage from repetitive tweaking of the headphone cord
-Breakage from dropping. Drop them on a hard surface and you have about a 50% chance it will survive.
Never had a hard-drive based player, and it probably wouldn't last more than a month for me.
"So you prefer short-hand glyphs to actually talking to someone where you can hear the tonal inflections? I gotta say, I think that's strange.
Yes I also much prefer text communication to phone for a variety of reasons:
I've never been particularly sensitive to tonal inflections, so I am probably emoting a heck of a lot more than I perceiving emotion in a phone conversation. This leads to a very one sided exchange, both in information, and in the sense of having companionship. It doesn't feel that way to me.
I parse written text much more efficiently than spoken due to a lifetime of reading. I also type about as fast as I speak, and prefer the way I express myself in the written word.
The ettiquette of instant messages, at least among my friends is that communicate according to your own schedule. If I choose to get up and have a walk on the beach at sunset, I often do so in the middle of a conversation, and on returning pick up where we left off. No need to say hellos or goodbyes, you simply respond when convenient.
"I'd much rather be out there doing something myself than sitting on the couch. Spectator sports are pointless as hell if you're a straight man."
Nice try, but I don't believe you get "out there" any more than the rest of us. Personally I got hooked on watching professional basketball when my coach told me to watch it to learn about mental toughness. Its called modelling. One can learn things from emulating the elite athletes who are the best at what they do. Things to improve your game, or even cross over to other facets of life such as teamwork in business. Plus it can simply be high drama.
You also might want to look into why you have such a strong negative reaction to the sight of men being affectionate in physical contact. I'm about as straight as they come and it bothers me not at all. Perhaps you are suppressing something?
Slashdot Mirror
being offered for download via bittorrent. World of Warcraft and Anarchy Online, both major MMORPGs are are distributing their client software via Bittorrent.
However, as our scientific understanding of a phenomenon grows, it naturally replaces the earlier, superstitious myths that sought to explain it. This is not to say that those myths are completely without value. They may indeed "help countless millions cope with their lives", but that does not give them scientific merit, nor elevate them above the status of "imagination".
Besides being a gripping read, Bow, Nigger conveyed to me exactly the information that would help me make a good choice buying this game. Specifically, I buy a game if I think that it will have a long life on my hard drive, and that means multiplayer. Through the course of the interesting narrative, the author touched on the mechanics of the game and the quality of the effects. But, more importantly, he conveyed the intangibles that are absent in any standard game review I've seen before. After reading the story I felt a sense of how the game actually plays, as well as a sense of its online community.
I'm searching now, in another window, for a copy of JKII on ebay, since I passed over this title when it was released.
(emphasis mine)
Here you go... See "Ariadne" and the end of "Norrathian Scrolls".
The opportunity cost of those 13 hours is in itself a "negative consequence". The time could have been spent in activities which can ameliorate, rather than reinforce a "social life slump". Withdrawal from society has a tendency to exacerbate such conditions.
benzapp is correct, I got my neurotransmitters mixed up.
"Ordinary" games such as first-person-shooters provide this sense of progression to a lesser degree. The more you play the better you get and when you perceive the progress you get your serotonin rush. However, after a while you get tired or hungry, your performance suffers and ends the reward of continued play. MMORPGS are less skill-intensive and continue to reward the player for button-mashing until they can no longer keep their eyes open.
The community of MMORPG players can also reinforce this addiction, by providing a surrogate to a "real life" community, thus making it easier to withdraw from personal contacts and harder to start them up again. Cults use much the same technique to make it difficult for members to leave and rejoin the larger community.
Revenge on Saddam for murdering innocents, simply does not justify our own murder of innocents. Perhaps, if the fantasies of Iraq as a shining bulwark of freedom and democracy were to be realized it would be worthwhile. But the reality is that we are looking at ongoing bloodshed, and a pending civil war bloodbath worse than the inhumane and barbaric regime we cast down.
The final sentence of Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest I have read in any genre.
"The sunlight on her back, the breeze against her wings, the water cool under her feet, her eggs warming and maturing in the flesh of the cabra: Life, so long waited for, and not until today could she be sure that she would be, not the last of her tribe, but the first."
Hah! I always liked that line from LotR, but out of context it is absolutely hilarious.
+1 Pedantic ;), but also quite correct.
I download tons of realaudio, convert it to mp3 and play it on my portables. This American Life is always the first thing I listen to. Simply the best radio show in existence, though I don't much like the David Sedaris segments.
Joe Frank is good too.
Then find out if she performs any other repetitive tasks and help her automate them.
What awards, exactly, has Rush Limbaugh won, let alone any that compare to the top film prize at Cannes?
But the bullet point that made me spit up my drink was: "Spread by Unix email servers".
A side benefit: She was a casual gamer at most when we met (I used to rib her for playing solitaire). But now look at her! My only complaint is that now she hogs all my bandwidth.
"And thou, Melkor, wilt discover all the secret thoughts of thy mind, and wilt perceive that they are but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory."
-- J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion
I have trouble understanding the attitude of Tolkien fans who seem unhappy with Jackson's work. Do you really imagine that a more faithful adaptation could be realized? I don't.
Understand that it is the extended editions which are the true versions for the Tolkien fan. The theatrical versions are far too choppy. But I simply cannot relate to any so-called Tolkien fan who does not appreciate the enormity of the task of bringing these books to life, and how it was done with such artistry, care and respect for the original work. Watch the extended commentary, and you may understand that some deviations, while you may not like them, were intended to further convey the themes of the books.
Perhaps because I have read (and reread) so much of the underlying Middle-Earth material published posthumously by Tolkien's son, I have come to view the stories of Middle-Earth as dynamic, evolving over time like an oral tradition. Tolkien described them in this way also. Thus this latest evolution is perhaps less shocking than reading Tolkien's earlier stories, with Sauron as a giant cat, or later King of Werewolves. It is clear to me that some of this earlier material is drawn on in the movie, as for example the romance of Arwen and Aragorn has taken on much of the flavor of the tale of Beren and Luthien.
The key thing is that the movies are true to the themes of the books, and capture the many-layered complexity of Tolkien's masterpiece. Changes to the narrative are forgiveable, and doubly so when you understand that they are intended to convey facets of the characters which the reader fully recognizes.
I saw it twice, and I'm fairly certain that Gollum wasn't pushed. He was dancing about with glee at recovering "his precious" just as in the book.
I agree with you completely about Denethor. Its really the only grievance I have left about the movies. Every other complaint I had (and I was seriously unhappy with the Two Towers theatrical version) has been mollified by the extended versions. In the extended editions, deviations like Aragorn's fall, and Faramir's Osgiliath make much more sense and flow better. In nearly every case I found that, while the movies departed from the narrative of the book, the purpose was usually to reveal some facet of the characters that was true to the book, such as Aragorn's facility with animals, or Faramir's conflicted sense of duty.
I'm quite confident that Denethor's character will be much more developed in the Extended RotK.
That's what the test environment is for. I'll throw out another reason why it can help to relax security on dev boxes. Programming in a business environment I have often been faced with problems that result from incorrectly configured supporting software, such as database engines or OS utilities. The programmer's task is to make something work, and being a mechanic with a lock on the toolbox will really make you pull your hair out. I know, I've been there.
Someone earlier compared programming to flipping burgers. I've always harbored somewhat the same thought about system admins, but the truth is that either profession can be approached with mediocrity or excellence. In an ideal world, all systems are perfectly configured, and a programmer can deal purely with code. In my world, programming is often an excercise in learning to properly configure the system itself, and then instructing/persuading the system administrators to do so. The test environment is a good place for this sort of reconciliation between the demands of the development process, and those of the production environment to occur. Testing is a documented event, and the issues that arise will quickly demonstrate whether the developer is playing too fast and loose on the dev boxes, or if the administration is incompetent.
That's about the first mainstream media article, abc no less, that I've seen really accurately describe a computer subculture. He's dead on, too. The reason I don't watch any TV anymore is because computer gaming has filled up that entertainment space.
Really didn't see any mistakes in the article, except maybe implying that 100 people could play on the same server at the same time.
Exactly. If skill transfer is the goal, there are much more efficient ways of going about it. Personally, I am a blindingly fast typist, and I do my best developing in sort of a flow state where I am coding nonsequentially and moving around within the environment with the agility of a video game. I don't see achieving this in a pairs environment.
On the flip side, I learn best by starting with a well designed, fully realized and functional product, cloning it and modifying it to do something else. Some explanation and documentation from the developer is always great, but there is nothing like reading good code. Trying to communicate code via speech is just a recipe for frustration, not efficient learning.
I wind up disassembling them to figure out what went wrong when they start shorting out.. Its usually one of the following:
-Moisture damage (I'm a heavy gym and running user, sweat drips down the headphone cord)
-Breakage from repetitive tweaking of the headphone cord
-Breakage from dropping. Drop them on a hard surface and you have about a 50% chance it will survive.
Never had a hard-drive based player, and it probably wouldn't last more than a month for me.
Yes I also much prefer text communication to phone for a variety of reasons:
I've never been particularly sensitive to tonal inflections, so I am probably emoting a heck of a lot more than I perceiving emotion in a phone conversation. This leads to a very one sided exchange, both in information, and in the sense of having companionship. It doesn't feel that way to me.
I parse written text much more efficiently than spoken due to a lifetime of reading. I also type about as fast as I speak, and prefer the way I express myself in the written word.
The ettiquette of instant messages, at least among my friends is that communicate according to your own schedule. If I choose to get up and have a walk on the beach at sunset, I often do so in the middle of a conversation, and on returning pick up where we left off. No need to say hellos or goodbyes, you simply respond when convenient.
Nice try, but I don't believe you get "out there" any more than the rest of us. Personally I got hooked on watching professional basketball when my coach told me to watch it to learn about mental toughness. Its called modelling. One can learn things from emulating the elite athletes who are the best at what they do. Things to improve your game, or even cross over to other facets of life such as teamwork in business. Plus it can simply be high drama.
You also might want to look into why you have such a strong negative reaction to the sight of men being affectionate in physical contact. I'm about as straight as they come and it bothers me not at all. Perhaps you are suppressing something?