According to this page, there are "undertakings, enforceable by heavy civil and criminal penalties," among which are:
# To pay the H1B worker at least the higher of the wage paid to similar workers in the same company or the "prevailing wage" (usually determined by the relevant State Employment Services Agency) for the occupation in the area the worker will be employed;
# That the recruitment of the H1B worker(s) will not adversely affect the conditions of the employer's US-resident employees in similar jobs;
Now.. if this is truly the case, if H1B visa workers really are being paid less then their US-resident counterparts, then that is a clear cut violation is it not? Has anybody tried to enforce these rules?
If I ruined all your cocaine do you think you'd be able to sue me for damages? I think that's the basic gist of what he meant.
On a different note, did anybody ever try to sue Wizards of the Coast when they came out with new Magic the Gathering cards that might have adversely affected the values of older ones? Such as new cards seemingly designed to counter overly powerful old ones? Seems like it'd be exactly the same situation, in a market that has absolutely zero question as to whether or not the cards have monetary value.
I can't say that I've stayed away MMORPGs strictly for such a simple reason, but getting rid of the ebay overtone to the game would definitely improve a game like this slightly.
The idea of people spending $$$ to get ahead isn't what intrinsically bothers me, it's just the fact that the suspension of disbelief is dispelled when what should be a fully contained alternative universe intersects at the most fundamental level with the real one.
Also, I'm willing to admit that the kind of people that are willing to farm in one way or another all day in order to make a buck I'd really rather see move on to another game. They have a vested interest to make all kinds of forum arguments that everything should be more scarce, time consuming and difficult, along with having the time and persistence to be a very vocal minority.
Which is basically what the gamecube is like. It's a nice system, but it has soooo few platform specific good games. It feels like a dead system because it has such big lulls between blockbusting games.
Wow, I never knew presently meant that. Can you explain how that makes sense at all? That's one of the most annoying irregularities in english I've ever encountered. The obvious adverb form of a word meaning something that is often functionally opposite? I'll never be able to use that word again because of it's potential for misuse and confusion! Ugh!
I actually went through a phase my senior year in high school of trying to write 'above' people with liberal use of 64 dollar words. My english teacher at the time would just simply tell me from time to time that I was building a wall. When I finally bit and asked him what he meant, he asked me why I liked to write things so that people wouldn't understand me. I had no answer.
I'd like to believe that is what is going to happen, but there are a few important things to take into consideration.
The wierdest, most difficult to address assumption is the idea that people don't currently like what they really like. I'm inferring that from your idea that people will go more 'more directly in line with their personal tastes.' It seems like a logical assumption from the standpoint that if you were given 5 choices before, once you've been given 50 that included those 5, you'd statistically pick new things. But I think that reasoning ignores certain aspects of what makes stardom and pop culture exist in the first place.
People like to like the things that other people like. There are advantages of being into pop culture. It's a lot of common ground to have with strangers. You can talk about it and establish the overall persona of a person on fairly neutral territory. The statement "Did you hear the lead xylophonist of 'Lurch Cadets' had albino triplets?" isn't going to be as effective at deteriming how you relate to another person as talking about something you actually both already know about.
I think that independent artists will rise independently of any pop-culture fall. When you consider how many times people hear the same songs over and over again, there is plenty of room to have both massive pop culture and niche involvement.
They are different, but there is no amount of difference that can say "Oh, it's copyright should be strictly enforced, and that one over there, no, not so much."
It's kind of like saying it's murder to kill a nun, but maybe not much of a crime to kill a drug addict. They are both murder. I hate to use a fairly lame analogy like that, but it is a similar kind of reasoning. You are trying to rationalize, or perhaps justify, one behavior over another for peripheral reasons that fundamentally don't change the truth of the copyright infrigement.
Fundamentally, the copyright holders do have the law on their side. What they don't seem to understand is that from a practical perspective, becoming so overbearing and maniacal is going to hurt them in the long run. People buy media they can relate to, it's kinda hard to relate to media that threatens and would like to spy on you.
Anybody here actually affected by this bug? I think if that happened to me I'd end up ceasing all use of the console forever, as if all that time playing those games wasn't lost in the first place, losing it a second time would be devastating, and at the same time I'd be like losing the value of all those games as pretty much none of them would I be willing to start over from scratch.
When I was a kid, I honestly didn't see -any- moral problem with cheating. To me it was just part of the game, and as long as you won and didn't get caught, you won, and getting caught was just another form of losing, and since if you wanted to cheat it meant you were likely to lose, it seemed to make no difference.
I think my perspective changed when I realized that losing well had social benefits.
I suppose a realization like that is much harder to make online.
I'm sure most of the cheaters would rationalize that it doesn't even apply at all, but knowing the kinds of friends I've made through mutually respectful play vs the kinds of people you see on their cheater forums I'd say the social rewards for not cheating are substaintially better online as well.
Adjust your level of ambient noise and suddenly it'll seem important.
I used to live near a really busy street and never noticed the fan noise. When I moved out into a quieter neighborhood it became rather noticable. Once it becomes something you can actually control, you think of it differently.
Seems like the simple best case solution would be have it standard so that when you mouse over a disabled menu item, it does a mouse-over popup explaining why it is disabled. Seems like an API supporting this concept would be simple enough, just have to make sure that it supports multiple reasons in case multiple execution paths have decided the item should be grayed. Unfortunately, thats an API only microsoft could provide for the most common case.
This sort of thing is probably my biggest frustration with writing end-user interactive desktop apps. You start down the path of using a nice functional framework provided by a microsoft, you are really happy, cruising along, but suddenly you really want to implement a feature like that. It can turn into a -serious- sidetrack if you want to do it in a semi-integrated way, and you'll end up down even more maddening and asinine paths if you've been relying heavily on GUI building tools and want integration there, next thing you know the complexity of your handy little disabled menu pop-ups is one of the most complex aspects of your project just because you tried to improve on a basic paradigm that has totally opaque guts.
This is part of why I am so much happier in my life as a back/mid-tier systems developer then I was as a front-end application guy. Dealing mostly with open source tools is one great factor, but I think even more profound is the fact that when I am using a proprietary tool, the support people I deal with tend to either be the engineers of said tools or can easily escalate directly to them anytime they don't know a solution. Also my customers are way more likely to be other geeks, so they tend to have concise and thought out requirements.
No, it's actually quite a bit more realistic then that. The logical extension of your black & white thinking is that only reality is realistic, thus negating any measure of what the entire concept of 'realistic' is all about.
It is a toy, but toys can teach us many things, because their behaviors model something bigger then themselves. The author's point in this article is that while SimCity has valid potential as a teaching tool, it has certain important flaws that must be made abundantly clear. The biggest of which is that the game is opaque, it's innerworkings are only known through experimentation and without any means to adjust the parameters of the model itself it only represents one side of what simulated models are all about.
So.. Valve purposely lets people register steam accounts and play the game for free for a couple days, and then bans them.. A lot of those people probably beat the game within that timeframe and lost nothing. I don't totally get it.
Perhaps they managed to accomplish:
Scaring some people away from pirating in the future. Misdirecting people away from the -real- warez versions that completely bypass the real Steam servers.
What's going to be really strange is if it turns out that the reason they were able to eliminate it is because Windows virtual memory was naturally better at doing the same basic concept.
That's one of the main things I look for when reading a review. Descriptions of the game, storyline, etc, are relatively useless information to me in a review. I'm more interested in understanding how they relate to the game in terms of other games they've liked, or what they were personally thinking during their first impressions.
If its only intermittent and only for a few seconds, you might have the auto-save stutter. The game has auto save points sprinkled about rather liberally that are the only cause of quite a few peoples' stutter. I don't know what part of suddenly writting out 8 megs to disk in the middle of gameplay seemed like a good idea at the time, with no way of turning it off.
I'm worried that even after this fix, that problem might still remain.
Well, we're talking about system memory here, not video. Maybe it turns out that Windows virtual memory paging is faster, or more importantly, more interrupt/interactivity friendly, then HL2's implementation of the same basic concept?
I disagree with you, but I don't think you should have been modded down to Troll. That's pretty inappropriate. I think the 2 systems will actually be able to coexist pretty well.
But it sure would be an interesting experiment though.. Assuming there was already a common goal, what do you think would happen? Assuming there is some quality to the engineers, I think they'd immediately recognize the need for organization and the first problem they would solve is establishing that by some kind of engineered process. Without a formal process, I think the natural leaders would emerge as the people who spearhead the most agreeded upon initiatives, people would naturally align themselves with the projects they feel most comfortable with.
But doing that with -120- people would be pretty nuts. I've seen natural hierarchies emerge in pools of 10-15 people working on a project, but 120 would definitely be something else. A big factor that I've seen with natural leaders emerging from a pool of previous equal individuals was the leaders' initiative to acquire neccesary resources. Whoever acquired neccesary resources first is
If you ran an experiment with preacquired resources that nobody involved was responsible for acquiring, I think the natural method of acquiring a leader would become seriously muddied by politics instead of practicality. Acquiring resources is something that can be demonstrated immediately. Spending them is something you can't judge until it's too late if you are wrong.
His point still stands though. It's a sacrifice. Anything you make at all, the very first decision you make whatsoever is whether you are going to actually make it, and that hinges almost entirely on how much it's going to cost to make. Stapling a bunch of fatty components together has the advantage of being relatively fast. It's not entirely uncommon for software to bloat up at first and trim it's fat here and there where it matters later.
So without bloatware, there would be products we wouldn't have at all.
Slashdot Mirror
What I find so utterly hilarious about the concept is that you are making people happy by rewarding them with not having to play as much.
Aka, the game is a chore, alleviating some of that chore makes people happy. Being able to pull a situation where people pay for that is pure genius.
According to this page, there are "undertakings, enforceable by heavy civil and criminal penalties," among which are:
# To pay the H1B worker at least the higher of the wage paid to similar workers in the same company or the "prevailing wage" (usually determined by the relevant State Employment Services Agency) for the occupation in the area the worker will be employed;
# That the recruitment of the H1B worker(s) will not adversely affect the conditions of the employer's US-resident employees in similar jobs;
Now.. if this is truly the case, if H1B visa workers really are being paid less then their US-resident counterparts, then that is a clear cut violation is it not? Has anybody tried to enforce these rules?
....
Boy who cried wolf, meet gamers who cried censorship.
If I ruined all your cocaine do you think you'd be able to sue me for damages? I think that's the basic gist of what he meant.
On a different note, did anybody ever try to sue Wizards of the Coast when they came out with new Magic the Gathering cards that might have adversely affected the values of older ones? Such as new cards seemingly designed to counter overly powerful old ones? Seems like it'd be exactly the same situation, in a market that has absolutely zero question as to whether or not the cards have monetary value.
I can't say that I've stayed away MMORPGs strictly for such a simple reason, but getting rid of the ebay overtone to the game would definitely improve a game like this slightly.
The idea of people spending $$$ to get ahead isn't what intrinsically bothers me, it's just the fact that the suspension of disbelief is dispelled when what should be a fully contained alternative universe intersects at the most fundamental level with the real one.
Also, I'm willing to admit that the kind of people that are willing to farm in one way or another all day in order to make a buck I'd really rather see move on to another game. They have a vested interest to make all kinds of forum arguments that everything should be more scarce, time consuming and difficult, along with having the time and persistence to be a very vocal minority.
At first I read that as "buy all 10 games"
Which is basically what the gamecube is like. It's a nice system, but it has soooo few platform specific good games. It feels like a dead system because it has such big lulls between blockbusting games.
Wow, I never knew presently meant that. Can you explain how that makes sense at all? That's one of the most annoying irregularities in english I've ever encountered. The obvious adverb form of a word meaning something that is often functionally opposite? I'll never be able to use that word again because of it's potential for misuse and confusion! Ugh!
I actually went through a phase my senior year in high school of trying to write 'above' people with liberal use of 64 dollar words. My english teacher at the time would just simply tell me from time to time that I was building a wall. When I finally bit and asked him what he meant, he asked me why I liked to write things so that people wouldn't understand me. I had no answer.
I'd like to believe that is what is going to happen, but there are a few important things to take into consideration.
The wierdest, most difficult to address assumption is the idea that people don't currently like what they really like. I'm inferring that from your idea that people will go more 'more directly in line with their personal tastes.' It seems like a logical assumption from the standpoint that if you were given 5 choices before, once you've been given 50 that included those 5, you'd statistically pick new things. But I think that reasoning ignores certain aspects of what makes stardom and pop culture exist in the first place.
People like to like the things that other people like. There are advantages of being into pop culture. It's a lot of common ground to have with strangers. You can talk about it and establish the overall persona of a person on fairly neutral territory. The statement "Did you hear the lead xylophonist of 'Lurch Cadets' had albino triplets?" isn't going to be as effective at deteriming how you relate to another person as talking about something you actually both already know about.
I think that independent artists will rise independently of any pop-culture fall. When you consider how many times people hear the same songs over and over again, there is plenty of room to have both massive pop culture and niche involvement.
They are different, but there is no amount of difference that can say "Oh, it's copyright should be strictly enforced, and that one over there, no, not so much."
It's kind of like saying it's murder to kill a nun, but maybe not much of a crime to kill a drug addict. They are both murder. I hate to use a fairly lame analogy like that, but it is a similar kind of reasoning. You are trying to rationalize, or perhaps justify, one behavior over another for peripheral reasons that fundamentally don't change the truth of the copyright infrigement.
Fundamentally, the copyright holders do have the law on their side. What they don't seem to understand is that from a practical perspective, becoming so overbearing and maniacal is going to hurt them in the long run. People buy media they can relate to, it's kinda hard to relate to media that threatens and would like to spy on you.
Anybody here actually affected by this bug? I think if that happened to me I'd end up ceasing all use of the console forever, as if all that time playing those games wasn't lost in the first place, losing it a second time would be devastating, and at the same time I'd be like losing the value of all those games as pretty much none of them would I be willing to start over from scratch.
When I was a kid, I honestly didn't see -any- moral problem with cheating. To me it was just part of the game, and as long as you won and didn't get caught, you won, and getting caught was just another form of losing, and since if you wanted to cheat it meant you were likely to lose, it seemed to make no difference.
I think my perspective changed when I realized that losing well had social benefits.
I suppose a realization like that is much harder to make online.
I'm sure most of the cheaters would rationalize that it doesn't even apply at all, but knowing the kinds of friends I've made through mutually respectful play vs the kinds of people you see on their cheater forums I'd say the social rewards for not cheating are substaintially better online as well.
Adjust your level of ambient noise and suddenly it'll seem important.
I used to live near a really busy street and never noticed the fan noise. When I moved out into a quieter neighborhood it became rather noticable. Once it becomes something you can actually control, you think of it differently.
Seems like the simple best case solution would be have it standard so that when you mouse over a disabled menu item, it does a mouse-over popup explaining why it is disabled. Seems like an API supporting this concept would be simple enough, just have to make sure that it supports multiple reasons in case multiple execution paths have decided the item should be grayed. Unfortunately, thats an API only microsoft could provide for the most common case.
This sort of thing is probably my biggest frustration with writing end-user interactive desktop apps. You start down the path of using a nice functional framework provided by a microsoft, you are really happy, cruising along, but suddenly you really want to implement a feature like that. It can turn into a -serious- sidetrack if you want to do it in a semi-integrated way, and you'll end up down even more maddening and asinine paths if you've been relying heavily on GUI building tools and want integration there, next thing you know the complexity of your handy little disabled menu pop-ups is one of the most complex aspects of your project just because you tried to improve on a basic paradigm that has totally opaque guts.
This is part of why I am so much happier in my life as a back/mid-tier systems developer then I was as a front-end application guy. Dealing mostly with open source tools is one great factor, but I think even more profound is the fact that when I am using a proprietary tool, the support people I deal with tend to either be the engineers of said tools or can easily escalate directly to them anytime they don't know a solution. Also my customers are way more likely to be other geeks, so they tend to have concise and thought out requirements.
No, it's actually quite a bit more realistic then that. The logical extension of your black & white thinking is that only reality is realistic, thus negating any measure of what the entire concept of 'realistic' is all about.
It is a toy, but toys can teach us many things, because their behaviors model something bigger then themselves. The author's point in this article is that while SimCity has valid potential as a teaching tool, it has certain important flaws that must be made abundantly clear. The biggest of which is that the game is opaque, it's innerworkings are only known through experimentation and without any means to adjust the parameters of the model itself it only represents one side of what simulated models are all about.
So.. Valve purposely lets people register steam accounts and play the game for free for a couple days, and then bans them.. A lot of those people probably beat the game within that timeframe and lost nothing. I don't totally get it.
Perhaps they managed to accomplish:
Scaring some people away from pirating in the future.
Misdirecting people away from the -real- warez versions that completely bypass the real Steam servers.
This will really date me, but on the box for Conan for the Commodore 64, it advertised:
"Revolutionary Slow Motion Feature when the action gets really intense."
It was basically the same flickering slow motion many c64 games got when the hardware wasn't up to the task.
What's going to be really strange is if it turns out that the reason they were able to eliminate it is because Windows virtual memory was naturally better at doing the same basic concept.
Good reviewers describe their biases in reviews.
That's one of the main things I look for when reading a review. Descriptions of the game, storyline, etc, are relatively useless information to me in a review. I'm more interested in understanding how they relate to the game in terms of other games they've liked, or what they were personally thinking during their first impressions.
If its only intermittent and only for a few seconds, you might have the auto-save stutter. The game has auto save points sprinkled about rather liberally that are the only cause of quite a few peoples' stutter. I don't know what part of suddenly writting out 8 megs to disk in the middle of gameplay seemed like a good idea at the time, with no way of turning it off.
I'm worried that even after this fix, that problem might still remain.
Well, we're talking about system memory here, not video. Maybe it turns out that Windows virtual memory paging is faster, or more importantly, more interrupt/interactivity friendly, then HL2's implementation of the same basic concept?
I disagree with you, but I don't think you should have been modded down to Troll. That's pretty inappropriate. I think the 2 systems will actually be able to coexist pretty well.
err.. weird typo.. meant to say that whoever acquired resources first is most likely to be trusted with managing those resources.
But it sure would be an interesting experiment though.. Assuming there was already a common goal, what do you think would happen? Assuming there is some quality to the engineers, I think they'd immediately recognize the need for organization and the first problem they would solve is establishing that by some kind of engineered process. Without a formal process, I think the natural leaders would emerge as the people who spearhead the most agreeded upon initiatives, people would naturally align themselves with the projects they feel most comfortable with.
But doing that with -120- people would be pretty nuts. I've seen natural hierarchies emerge in pools of 10-15 people working on a project, but 120 would definitely be something else. A big factor that I've seen with natural leaders emerging from a pool of previous equal individuals was the leaders' initiative to acquire neccesary resources. Whoever acquired neccesary resources first is
If you ran an experiment with preacquired resources that nobody involved was responsible for acquiring, I think the natural method of acquiring a leader would become seriously muddied by politics instead of practicality. Acquiring resources is something that can be demonstrated immediately. Spending them is something you can't judge until it's too late if you are wrong.
His point still stands though. It's a sacrifice. Anything you make at all, the very first decision you make whatsoever is whether you are going to actually make it, and that hinges almost entirely on how much it's going to cost to make. Stapling a bunch of fatty components together has the advantage of being relatively fast. It's not entirely uncommon for software to bloat up at first and trim it's fat here and there where it matters later.
So without bloatware, there would be products we wouldn't have at all.