The problem with "what's $species good for" is that we probably don't even know. The Chinese killed off sparrows during the Four Pest Campaigns in what's dubbed the Great Leap Forwards (also known as the Great Leap into a fucking Mess) because they allegedly ate grain and fruits. They did, but what they ate even more were locusts.
I leave it to the reader to ponder just what the very unintended consequence was.
You are allowed to learn from the blunders of others. In this case, that eliminating a species without knowing what this entails is stupid.
Yes, girls are a very desirable demographic. But the problem they faced, and failed to address, was how to attract that demographic while not alienating the existing audience in the process. They achieved exactly the opposite, they did not pull in new readers while at the same time making existing ones turn away.
It's not an economic problem. Comics were pretty much inflation-adjusted stable until the 1970s when the price started to rise already, and there was no problem. Inflation-adjusted prices doubled from 1970 to 1990 and there was no dip in sales. So it ain't the price, really. We're also not talking about Faberge egg collecting, this is comic books. We're looking at a price tag where you can still buy 2-3 comic books for the price of a delivery pizza, and last time I checked, food delivery isn't about to crumble because people would rather buy frozen stuff and heat it in their microwave rather than order some pizza out.
It is the content.
And it isn't even that traditionally white male roles have been "diversified". We've had that before. What is the problem is that this has become the focus. That action heroes started to be "sensitive" and "talk about their feelings". And nobody reading those comic books really cared about that crap. And while we enjoy back stories and giving characters a (usually tragic) history, there is a reason it's called a back story. It's supposed to flesh the character out and give him some depth, not become the fucking focus of his stories.
The problem with microcontrollers and security is that security consumes a fair lot of processing power if done right. And while this is really no concern these days for a desktop or even a mobile computer (including smartphones), it still is a concern for lower end IoT devices powered by microcontrollers that can barely accomplish what their function is with the computing power they have.
And try to justify the 2.50 bucks for the extra IC (or the next powerful IC) to implement sensible security. Not to mention the hundreds of hours.
IoT could be made secure. The problem is that security costs time and money, and it ain't something people care or even know about. Especially in devices they don't consider "computers".
It's almost like they want to claim that companies who have no experience with networked devices because so far their main experience lies in a totally different segment of electronics where the "networked" part is only tacked on as an afterthought don't spend time and resources making a feature secure they mainly have as a sales gimmick.
Considering that most of the crappy code is just copy/pasted from some net sources and then shoehorned into the existing (and most likely of equal quality) code, strong typing doesn't really make that much of a difference. Bugs that depend on the wrong type of parameter being passed and misinterpreted are usually quick to surface. The real problem is edge cases and security, and both depend more on thorough testing and actually knowing what you're doing.
Moving to.net won't make you any happier, because strong typing does not make a better code base. Better programmers make better code base. And neither PHP nor.net require you in any way to be a good programmer. Both come with sufficiently plentiful training wheels that both of them attract people who have no idea what they're doing and rely mostly on cargo cult programming.
But this is how programming is these days. Yes, you still have a few good (and very expensive) people who know what they're doing and who actually understand the implications of using this function (or API call) instead of that one, but for every programmer who does know that, you have at least a dozen who copy/paste most of their code from various online sources after googling the problem du jour. This is an universal problem and not one you can solve by switching the programming language.
If you want to solve that problem, you have to switch the user base.
What I don't understand is that you propose here only two possible outcomes. Either he's living a life in misery with a miserable job that he comes home from and spends a few hours in front of the tube, or, lacking that miserable job, he heads for drugs.
Facing only this choice, the drugs are actually the better choice. I don't know if you realize that. Unless you really want to propose that misery is better than artificial happiness.
You're looking at it from a different angle than most gamers. You enjoy it as a developer achievement, something few other people really care about. Let me explain.
I develop hardware on the side. It's a bit of a pet project of mine and from time to time I watch what others develop. And someone came up with a really nifty design for a tiny web server in hardware. It was a beauty. Great craftsmanship, well designed, tweaked and perfected, hardware and firmware extremely optimized, hand crafted assembler code to get it to speed on what should have been a too weak IC to run it.
I showed it to a friend and his only comment was "Could be done on a RasPi, and cheaper". I tried to explain the amazing work behind it, he didn't care. He cared about the result. Nothing else.
Same here. Yes, it may be a great development achievement. But people playing it don't care. They want a game. As far as they're concerned, it could be oompa-loompas drawing 50 pictures per second.
I stopped a long time ago. I've been burned one too many times. You want to sell me a game, you better have reviews (from actual reviewers rather than paid mouthpieces) to convince me. Yes, that means I play the game a week or two later, but I avoid duds like that.
Frankly, far too often we've seen games, even from formerly reputable studios, fall short of their promises. Franchises that used to be a guaranteed feast were turned into bland and boring cheap shots. No thanks. Prove that you delivered, and then I'll buy. Especially if you call no backsies by default.
By the way, calling something a "war on..." is usually in the same league as adding "-gate" to something: A weak attempt to make something sound interesting and scandalous that nobody would otherwise give 2 fucks about.
Back when I was young (and there was still snow THIS high, i.e. before global warming, and before the invention of boots) internet access in my country was pretty much something that you either had when you were rich or when you went to a technically inclined university. Now, transporting graphics on an internet link was pretty much unheard of or at the very least frowned upon (the university had a lightning fast 2mbit connection... still pretty impressive when you were used to 9.6kbit), so text it was.
This was also the time when I started playing a new kind of RPG, unfortunately one nobody else wanted to play, so when I found a MU* that did, my life was complete.
And my university progress took a sharp decline...
That's less of a concern for the more social oriented ones, but even they suffer. Old players leave but few new players join. Text games just don't have the same pull anymore for a new generation of players, I guess. I have no idea where they're moving to, though.
I've spent a couple hundred if not thousands of hours RPing in a MUSH some 20 years ago. Even went on a trip to the US to visit some of the other players. Looking back it was kinda crazy to fly across an ocean to meet people you pretty much don't know anything about... it was a different time, I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with "what's $species good for" is that we probably don't even know. The Chinese killed off sparrows during the Four Pest Campaigns in what's dubbed the Great Leap Forwards (also known as the Great Leap into a fucking Mess) because they allegedly ate grain and fruits. They did, but what they ate even more were locusts.
I leave it to the reader to ponder just what the very unintended consequence was.
You are allowed to learn from the blunders of others. In this case, that eliminating a species without knowing what this entails is stupid.
Not to mention that global warming would actually be a GOOD thing on Mars.
Species will now be not endangered or already extinct. Finding a specimen of a species that's defined as extinct is a temporary statistical error.
Yeah, because everyone knows as long as you don't find the horse, you can still pretend it's inside the barn.
Because the story was not about a white guy replacing a white guy. It was still superhero goes to save the day against evildoer in funny costume.
The problem isn't that the superhero is now a black lesbian woman, the problem is that the story revolves around her being a black lesbian woman.
Yes, girls are a very desirable demographic. But the problem they faced, and failed to address, was how to attract that demographic while not alienating the existing audience in the process. They achieved exactly the opposite, they did not pull in new readers while at the same time making existing ones turn away.
It's not an economic problem. Comics were pretty much inflation-adjusted stable until the 1970s when the price started to rise already, and there was no problem. Inflation-adjusted prices doubled from 1970 to 1990 and there was no dip in sales. So it ain't the price, really. We're also not talking about Faberge egg collecting, this is comic books. We're looking at a price tag where you can still buy 2-3 comic books for the price of a delivery pizza, and last time I checked, food delivery isn't about to crumble because people would rather buy frozen stuff and heat it in their microwave rather than order some pizza out.
It is the content.
And it isn't even that traditionally white male roles have been "diversified". We've had that before. What is the problem is that this has become the focus. That action heroes started to be "sensitive" and "talk about their feelings". And nobody reading those comic books really cared about that crap. And while we enjoy back stories and giving characters a (usually tragic) history, there is a reason it's called a back story. It's supposed to flesh the character out and give him some depth, not become the fucking focus of his stories.
For what? For not having incriminating evidence on me?
The problem with microcontrollers and security is that security consumes a fair lot of processing power if done right. And while this is really no concern these days for a desktop or even a mobile computer (including smartphones), it still is a concern for lower end IoT devices powered by microcontrollers that can barely accomplish what their function is with the computing power they have.
And try to justify the 2.50 bucks for the extra IC (or the next powerful IC) to implement sensible security. Not to mention the hundreds of hours.
IoT could be made secure. The problem is that security costs time and money, and it ain't something people care or even know about. Especially in devices they don't consider "computers".
It's almost like they want to claim that companies who have no experience with networked devices because so far their main experience lies in a totally different segment of electronics where the "networked" part is only tacked on as an afterthought don't spend time and resources making a feature secure they mainly have as a sales gimmick.
But you didn't shoot the camera.
That was your mistake.
Considering that most of the crappy code is just copy/pasted from some net sources and then shoehorned into the existing (and most likely of equal quality) code, strong typing doesn't really make that much of a difference. Bugs that depend on the wrong type of parameter being passed and misinterpreted are usually quick to surface. The real problem is edge cases and security, and both depend more on thorough testing and actually knowing what you're doing.
Produce what sells and not what some loudmouths that never bought comic books (and never will) demand.
Yes, it is actually that easy.
Moving to .net won't make you any happier, because strong typing does not make a better code base. Better programmers make better code base. And neither PHP nor .net require you in any way to be a good programmer. Both come with sufficiently plentiful training wheels that both of them attract people who have no idea what they're doing and rely mostly on cargo cult programming.
But this is how programming is these days. Yes, you still have a few good (and very expensive) people who know what they're doing and who actually understand the implications of using this function (or API call) instead of that one, but for every programmer who does know that, you have at least a dozen who copy/paste most of their code from various online sources after googling the problem du jour. This is an universal problem and not one you can solve by switching the programming language.
If you want to solve that problem, you have to switch the user base.
What I don't understand is that you propose here only two possible outcomes. Either he's living a life in misery with a miserable job that he comes home from and spends a few hours in front of the tube, or, lacking that miserable job, he heads for drugs.
Facing only this choice, the drugs are actually the better choice. I don't know if you realize that. Unless you really want to propose that misery is better than artificial happiness.
In other words, fuck threats, shit or get off the pot.
You're looking at it from a different angle than most gamers. You enjoy it as a developer achievement, something few other people really care about. Let me explain.
I develop hardware on the side. It's a bit of a pet project of mine and from time to time I watch what others develop. And someone came up with a really nifty design for a tiny web server in hardware. It was a beauty. Great craftsmanship, well designed, tweaked and perfected, hardware and firmware extremely optimized, hand crafted assembler code to get it to speed on what should have been a too weak IC to run it.
I showed it to a friend and his only comment was "Could be done on a RasPi, and cheaper". I tried to explain the amazing work behind it, he didn't care. He cared about the result. Nothing else.
Same here. Yes, it may be a great development achievement. But people playing it don't care. They want a game. As far as they're concerned, it could be oompa-loompas drawing 50 pictures per second.
I stopped a long time ago. I've been burned one too many times. You want to sell me a game, you better have reviews (from actual reviewers rather than paid mouthpieces) to convince me. Yes, that means I play the game a week or two later, but I avoid duds like that.
Frankly, far too often we've seen games, even from formerly reputable studios, fall short of their promises. Franchises that used to be a guaranteed feast were turned into bland and boring cheap shots. No thanks. Prove that you delivered, and then I'll buy. Especially if you call no backsies by default.
In other words, kids, please don't grow up to become like your parents!
You think it has more impact? On Slashdot?
By the way, calling something a "war on..." is usually in the same league as adding "-gate" to something: A weak attempt to make something sound interesting and scandalous that nobody would otherwise give 2 fucks about.
Back when I was young (and there was still snow THIS high, i.e. before global warming, and before the invention of boots) internet access in my country was pretty much something that you either had when you were rich or when you went to a technically inclined university. Now, transporting graphics on an internet link was pretty much unheard of or at the very least frowned upon (the university had a lightning fast 2mbit connection... still pretty impressive when you were used to 9.6kbit), so text it was.
This was also the time when I started playing a new kind of RPG, unfortunately one nobody else wanted to play, so when I found a MU* that did, my life was complete.
And my university progress took a sharp decline...
That's less of a concern for the more social oriented ones, but even they suffer. Old players leave but few new players join. Text games just don't have the same pull anymore for a new generation of players, I guess. I have no idea where they're moving to, though.
Yeah, MUSHes used to be really uptight about grammar back in the days... today you could even get away with something like this. :)
I've spent a couple hundred if not thousands of hours RPing in a MUSH some 20 years ago. Even went on a trip to the US to visit some of the other players. Looking back it was kinda crazy to fly across an ocean to meet people you pretty much don't know anything about... it was a different time, I'd say.
I'm waiting for the part where you explain why this is a problem.