If I had to work with her, this would be a serious problem for me. I'm not saying that's grounds to not hire attractive women, but it might be why I'd have to look for another job myself.
Give yourself more credit. You are bound to eventually interact with women you find attractive in the workplace, and you will quickly learn how to compose yourself. You'll be fine. Besides, you couldn't flee from women forever: they're well over 50% of the world, and even if they are a minority in the technical fields (or whatever it is that you do for a living), you'll interact with them eventually, maybe the HR department, or someone in the Sales department, or an executive. Or, heck, a client!
Eventually you'll stop paying attention to gender and just interact with them as if they're people who have ideas that you collaborate with.
It's the same skill you learn to master when you get married and then continue to interact with women in the real world, as a monogamous man. (Well, if that's your plan, no intent to offend.)
4. Have sex at an age of 18 when your partner is under the age of consent, but not signifigantly younger than you. (You're newly 18, partner is one month from 16 here in the state of Michigan. Friend's nephew learned that one the hard way.)
5. Skinny dipping in a secluded area when someone happens by.
6. Homosexual sex with a consenting partner in some states.
This is just a case of politicians trying their best to look good and gather votes by engaging in a crusade against Bad People(tm). So, we end up with zero-tolerance laws.
No one wants to vote against them because their opponents will then say "Politician Blahblah is soft on sex offenders."
This is not a US phenomenon, it's a democratic phenomenon. We just happen to have sex as our particular hangup... other countries have harmless weapons as their hangup.
"We must ban crossbows. I once heard a crossbow was used in a crime in a little known area, one time. So, there's no reason you should need one. I propose a ban."
(Never mind that I can use a pencil to do harm to another person, and thus use the threat of that harm to commit the same crime. Or even just my fists.)
See, with all this attention to the digits, I almost wish I would have signed up sooner. I put it off since I didn't see the point to singing up if all I did was lurk.
However, if you read the rest of his site, you see that he was tricky about it.
He left a phone number for the spammer to call, when the spammer called they heard a recording saying that their phone call may be recorded. Then he asked the spammer about his rates for spam, in great detail.
When he presented the evidence in court, he explained all of this to the judge so that the judge would understand it. (Originally, the tapes were thrown out due to him not explaining it enough, but he put in the additional details in his future motions.)
Heh. I'm replying to you here, but I doubt that anyone other than us two would care. Perhaps I'm wrong, so here I am.
I like 3rd Edition, it seems like a simplified version of 1st/2nd edition. That's not a bad thing at all. The things that you speak as being BAD things, can be argued to be good things. (Monte Cook had a good article on why classes, levels, and such are good. He had his pet peeves, wanting to remove AC. I don't like level based HP, but he likes it. D&D 3ed is a compromise, though, between 3 veteran game designers. The lead of which wrote a game without classes, armor class, level based hitpoints, etc, that being Mr. Tweet. And he being one the designers of Ars Magica, which launched White Wolf and thus Vampire.)
I'm not saying that they are always good, or that they're perfectly executed. It's just that it's a comfortable medium between "just like the old days" and "new ideas and good stuff" to keep the strengths of D&D and incorporate some good ideas that should have been there from the beginning. You can't alienate your old players (listen to all the grognards saying that 1st edition is better than 2nd edition, so why did we need a third edition). Also listen to all the people who say, "It's just like GURPS."
3rd Edition is neither, honestly. GURPS has far more versatile character generation, but the combat resolution system is not for a newbie. (I'm sure that if I were to have witnessed it in action, I might have learned it easier.) However, with the d20 system and a battlemap, I've mastered how to handle combat resolution without needing a demonstration. (I was the first person to DM a group in our area.)
(Oh, and for those that complain about Track being a feat -- that's because if it were a skill, then one of the main benefits of being a Ranger would be lost. Arguably, it could have been an exclusive skill, but making it a feat is a way of saying that despite having a high wisdom, you still will fail that wilderness lore.)
Finally, about contract-based-model, they are moving forward to use more freelance workers. As a programmer, I would prefer to work for a company so that I know I get paid, even if my project gets cancelled. Projects get cancelled. WotC is not going to make money maknig modules. They produced 9 small modules and the higher ups complained about having to do that all the ways. The whole point of the SRD/d20 license is so that small companies can handle that sort of thing. It's not profitable for a big company. But, going from 750 employees to 250 is frightening, especially given who they laid off.
Re:WotC could lay off because the project is done.
on
Layoffs at WotC
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From what I understand, they were offered nice severance packages. But, they still have a history at the company. Jeff Grubb has been there since 1st Edition, Skip Williams has been INVOLVED (not part of the company, but writing a rules advice column for Dragon) since then as well.
Hopefully, Skip will be hired by Paizo Publishing, who just recently bought the rights to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Since WotC no longer owns those magazines, it means that a layoff from WotC can result in hiring by Paizo. We can all hope. (But then again, Paizo might not be able to afford him. They are a much smaller company.)
A lot of these guys go on to make their own companies, though. The d20 version of "open source" works much differently than the software Open Source. The d20 style results in many small companies that produce products with varying degrees of quality. (Some are EXTREMELY good, and some are EXTREMELY bad.) But, they're all out earning money.
Honestly, the way he presented it in that article seemed to be very close to what I've gathered to be PROBABLY true. He invented the concept of the dungeon-adventure, with medieval fighting man miniatures going into the dungeon.
Gygax made up the rules which said that you could have player class X, with Y hitpoints, etc. Arneson had the idea that the miniatures had hitpoints, etc. Gygax made the leap which said that the miniatures just represented the personalities. So, I would say Arneson is more correct to say he was the father of "adventure gaming" and not roleplaying.
Gygax and Arneson are both trumped for actual "father of roleplaying" however, by the inventor of the "Braunstein" adventures. (I think it was David Wesley.) These were wargames where players could assume the roles of "President of Local University" and "General of Allied Forces." You talked your way into and out of things. It was more of a "How to Host a Murder Mystery" style roleplaying game. Sort of a LARP with a wargame tossed in. That really smacks heavily of the "First roleplaying game."
Arneson is the first one to have a roleplaying campaign setting, but only the second or third to ever have a published campaign setting. (You get really fuzzy with what came first between "Greyhawk," "Blackmoor," and "Tekumel.") And when you come down to it, Tolkien's Middle Earth predated them all, was a richer background, and had all the information to set up a good RPG.
So, any amount of "me me me" is mostly unfounded. You can always trace back to someone who predated you. But, they're still forefathers. And if one of them wants to have enough of an ego to say, "I invented it all" then let them... As long as they said, "And all my buddies helped me a lot." Arneson usually credits Gygax pretty well. I've seen interviews where BOTH of them downplay each other's achievements, but they seem to be much more gracious nowadays.
I'm waiting to see a good interview by Steve Jackson about his involvement in the beginnings of RPGs. Steve Jackson sounds like a very interesting fellow. In fact, they all sound fascinating. But, SJ was the first of those old RPGers to realize what an impact that computers were going to have on RPGs. Some of the companies of today are just NOW realizing how important the computer is to the modern RPG. (Wizards can barely recognize it. For a company that big, their attention to their webpage is kind of a side gesture. If they put some serious moeny behind it, I would be very impressed by what those guys could do.)
The whole "origins of RPG" seems all misty to me. You can read interviews with Rob Kuntz, Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, and others... You get the impression that its a group of relatively good friends, with the typical tensions. You know, typical gaming group.
They come up with a cool idea. You never really know WHO was the one who came up with it. All of them claim to have varying levels of importance in the creation, and all of them have counter stories to each others stories. Some of them are under legal obligation not to reveal their side of the story anymore.
You know that Arneson was very involved. You also know he signed a legal document saying he's not going to argue with Gygax anymore, basically.
But, you do know that Gygax is the one who quit his job and started fixing shoes in order to get the game off the ground. No matter who created it, Gygax was the one who believed in it.
So, I'm pretty sure that I'll never get the story. But, it's definitely intriguing. I love these interviews, though. Makes me all misty eyed that I was too young to see the origins of RPGs. But then again, I'm young enough that I'll see a few generations more. (And I'm glad that I'm not so crusty that I'm unwilling to play the most excellent 3rd edition.) Here's over 20 years of gaming under my belt, and hopefully many many more to come.
Wizards no logner does this service, they outsourced it to Bastion Press. I'm thinking that Wizards will continue to sell them, but Bastion controls which ones will be scanned, in which order. I talked to Jim Butler there (God, I love excuses that let me email game designers) and unfortunately he says that he's tried to convince them to release a bunch on CD, but that they didn't go for it. So, mail the wizards people and politely ask them if they would be interested in making a CD chock full of these ESDs. It would be Oh So Cool! (I'd rather pay $100 for a ton of ESDs than pay $5 for one. I end up burning them on a CD myself anyhow.)
We do that in Win98/WinNT all the time. Of course, we also make sure to have the toolbar on autohide, minimized, and on the opposite side of the screen. We have all the icons renamed, or we have them dragged off the edge of the screen.
If you're really brave, a little registry tweaking can get it even scarier.
Of course, I no longer work at that company. Heh. (For different reasons, and we mostnly only really monkied with the "Crash and Burn" machines, which were regularly reformatted, used for testing misbehaving programs.)
I got one at my current employer. I would have been moving from a job I liked to a job I didn't like. So, I asked for a counter offer, which they originally weren't going to give because they felt that I should expand my career, etc. Then when they realized all the stuff that I did, they gave me one that was slightly under the other job's pay. So, I was disappointed, but considered it, and then took it.
Even today, I still don't make as much as I would have made at the other place. The main reason I turned it down is because the other job would have entailed programming in Access Basic, whereas here at least I get to do Visual Basic. It turned out that my counter-offer pay increase was considered my raise for the year. And since then, I've gotten one good raise, and one 0% raise. (Which has upset me terribly, enough to consider leaving again.) The only really good thing about it is that I've gotten a promotion out of it.
So, the success of this story is that my employer seems to believe I'll stick around for the long haul. So, they aren't worried about me being disloyal. But, on the other hand, it didn't improve things terribly much.
I know C++, I do not know the STL. The STL did not exist when I learned C++. I learned it back in 1992, when it was still being finalized. In addition, I never learned about namespaces, some of the rules changed, and a whole host of other problems. It makes it hard for me to convince people I know C++. I do. I use Rogue Wave and code in C++ sometimes. And I use Java other times. And perl. And VB. It makes it hard to keep everything perfectly straight, so it makes it hard for me to convince people I know C++ sometimes.
Heh. Everyone keeps talking about setting up my own server. Keep in mind that, despite being a programmer, I'm a guy running Windows 98 at home and Windows NT at work, who just wants to talk to coworkers and family members.
The JabberView solution sounds good, though. If there really is a good server out there with the capability, I'd switch to it. (I was using theoretic.com before.) I know that my coworkers might not ever switch, even the ones using Trillian. WinJab isn't pretty. Someone really needs to go visit the Trillian developers and convince them of the beauty of Jabber, so that they can add to the effort. Their client is "pretty" and their interoperability is rather solid.
I agree with you, but I disagree with one point. By signing up with MSN and Yahoo, I've opened up channels to me from people who only use MSN or Yahoo. Believe it or not, there are people out there like that. (which I'm assuming you do believe). I never use their proprietary features. File transfer, voice chat, group communication, etc. None of it is my main concern. I want a simple message capability. For Jabber to be useful for me, it must communicate with AIM and ICQ. AOL is the villain here, I already know that. I've been so utterly tempted to boycott Time Warner/AOL due to their handling of the situation "Other IM's cannot connect to our servers, it means lost revenue." (Well, a boycott could mean even more lost revenue.) But, I also need them for work. (Manager is an AIM user.)
I'd gladly campaign for moving my department over to Jabber, so we could have an internal server for it. BUT, with it lacking AIM/ICQ support, I'd have a harder time selling it to my other coworkers who aren't fired up about it. (Who want to talk to their wife/aunt/father/whatever who are single IM client users). Jabber either needs to maintain that compatbility to take off, not just to "ease migration."
For those who have responded: Thanks very much! I will definitely look back into WinJab, since I just prefer the Jabber solution. The interoperability is important to me, unfortunately. For Jabber to take off, it either needs a larger base of users (hook the moms and pops) or it needs to operate with those IMs which already have the moms and pops hooked. But, I just prefer the philosophy of Jabber better.
Oh, and for the record: I used theoretic.com for my server. The operator (theo) has been so tremendously helpful that I used it, when Jabber.com and Jabber.org were too flooded to be useful for me.
I've played around with the jabber module in Perl, which was pretty easy to use.
Jabber started to disappoint when they stopped supporting AIM/ICQ. I don't know if it's permanent, I don't actually know if it's still not supported. But, since AIM is what I have to use for work (otherwise, I would still just be using ICQ to talk to my friends), I needed something that could stay connected.
I use Trillian now. It still does ICQ/AIM as well as IRC/MSN/Y!, which is why I need something like this, but it doesn't provide source code (which I only really want for the principle of it) and it doesn't support Jabber's protocol. (They're talking about releasing an API for writing plugins. At least it's free (as in beer). (I've got a few of my coworkers switched from AIM to Trillian...) Hopefully Jabber will fix up the connectivity issues (or have ALREADY fixed them up.) gosh, I should download WinJab again and check.
I got really excited about Jabber for the longest time. I'm sort of disappointed in it now, since it seems like they're still having problems connecting to AIM and ICQ. The AIM connection is the most vital for me, since our department uses AIM to send short quick messages to each other. Most of the people here are using AIM's own client, but I started to use Jabber so that I could talk to my friends on ICQ. (And promptly signed up for MSN and Yahoo, so I could catch everyone from everywhere.) Now I use Trillian, which only disappoints me by neither providing source code (which I only want for the principle of it) nor supporting Jabber itself (which does kind of bug me).
I was waiting for someone to mention that movie. Watched it last night, come in and see the Slashdot story about being able to break previously unbreakable codes.
Of course, all the other technological gaffes are still there. (For now.) My future roommate was mocking me because she thought it was funny that I was pointing out little holes. I imagine she'll mock me more when it turns out that at least one of them is possibly not a hole. (Though, screens that morph from garbled text into clear text via graphics is still funny.)
That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using.CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to.CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a.COM file then.)
When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).
I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)
This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.
Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"
This sounded like it was going to be a neat technology. I got myself a CueCat and tried it out for a while, but it did seem a little too overhyped and a little too "head in the clouds."
Yeh, I had to sign an NDA after working a call center.. It was a lot like that, though. I learned some neat tricks. Like how to make your calls last EXACTLY the amount of time you needed.
Tech support makes you evil. It makes you do things like get the customer angry, he'll want to speak to YOUR maanger -- and you don't get in trouble, because, well... You're GOOD at it. Or format their hard drive... It takes a while, and thy can call back later.)
My call times were excellent. The person with the best call times got two movie passes. I earned six (they never gave them to me, though).
My managers played even weirder games. They fired people who were looking for other jobs. firing people looks "Good"... having people leave because they're unhappy is "Bad." They'd fired people for being 5 minutes late from work. Another friend was fired for violating the "NDA" because on his PERSONAL HOME PAGE he had a recording of a customer getting upset with a tech. (The call center for this was in Arizona). They accused him of recording a call (HOW?)... And the technician wasn't him, and the conversation metnioned the call center being where we didn't have an office. It was very scary.
I never got the "You're fired" on your last day of the job like most other techs did. I found the secret... If you're polite to the boss when you're leaving, and your reason is "Professional Advancement" (I went back to being a programmer -- I had temporarily forgotten that programmers are in demand, and worked customer support) then they get a good review.
I'm just SCARED to see the numbers my supervisors were rated on. I can understand the "computer with the numbers blinking." But, having to fire people for being 5 minutes late from lunch (inside the building) GAH!
One nice thing about Pike is that its based on LPC, which if any of you are LPMudders, can be a good thing. A lot of us wasted a lot of our college (and post college) years programming in LPC... and then to suddenly have that skill turn into something useful. Whoooiie!
Slashdot Mirror
If I had to work with her, this would be a serious problem for me. I'm not saying that's grounds to not hire attractive women, but it might be why I'd have to look for another job myself.
Give yourself more credit. You are bound to eventually interact with women you find attractive in the workplace, and you will quickly learn how to compose yourself. You'll be fine. Besides, you couldn't flee from women forever: they're well over 50% of the world, and even if they are a minority in the technical fields (or whatever it is that you do for a living), you'll interact with them eventually, maybe the HR department, or someone in the Sales department, or an executive. Or, heck, a client!
Eventually you'll stop paying attention to gender and just interact with them as if they're people who have ideas that you collaborate with.
It's the same skill you learn to master when you get married and then continue to interact with women in the real world, as a monogamous man. (Well, if that's your plan, no intent to offend.)
The difficulty is that IBM has a lot of remote employees, both working at other offices as well as working from home.
I had a meeting a few hours ago with about seven people. Only one of them was in my office, so we just had it in his cube with a speaker phone.
So, it's tough to know who is doing what during a meeting. So, this might help with that.
Add to that list:
4. Have sex at an age of 18 when your partner is under the age of consent, but not signifigantly younger than you. (You're newly 18, partner is one month from 16 here in the state of Michigan. Friend's nephew learned that one the hard way.)
5. Skinny dipping in a secluded area when someone happens by.
6. Homosexual sex with a consenting partner in some states.
This is just a case of politicians trying their best to look good and gather votes by engaging in a crusade against Bad People(tm). So, we end up with zero-tolerance laws.
No one wants to vote against them because their opponents will then say "Politician Blahblah is soft on sex offenders."
This is not a US phenomenon, it's a democratic phenomenon. We just happen to have sex as our particular hangup... other countries have harmless weapons as their hangup.
"We must ban crossbows. I once heard a crossbow was used in a crime in a little known area, one time. So, there's no reason you should need one. I propose a ban."
(Never mind that I can use a pencil to do harm to another person, and thus use the threat of that harm to commit the same crime. Or even just my fists.)
If I remember right, my friend got a two or three digit almost a month before I finally bothered to register for mine in order to make a comment.
There was actually a bit of a stir about having to register for accounts back then, if I remember right.
See, with all this attention to the digits, I almost wish I would have signed up sooner. I put it off since I didn't see the point to singing up if all I did was lurk.
However, if you read the rest of his site, you see that he was tricky about it.
He left a phone number for the spammer to call, when the spammer called they heard a recording saying that their phone call may be recorded. Then he asked the spammer about his rates for spam, in great detail.
When he presented the evidence in court, he explained all of this to the judge so that the judge would understand it. (Originally, the tapes were thrown out due to him not explaining it enough, but he put in the additional details in his future motions.)
The site is interesting to read.
Heh. I'm replying to you here, but I doubt that anyone other than us two would care. Perhaps I'm wrong, so here I am.
I like 3rd Edition, it seems like a simplified version of 1st/2nd edition. That's not a bad thing at all. The things that you speak as being BAD things, can be argued to be good things. (Monte Cook had a good article on why classes, levels, and such are good. He had his pet peeves, wanting to remove AC. I don't like level based HP, but he likes it. D&D 3ed is a compromise, though, between 3 veteran game designers. The lead of which wrote a game without classes, armor class, level based hitpoints, etc, that being Mr. Tweet. And he being one the designers of Ars Magica, which launched White Wolf and thus Vampire.)
I'm not saying that they are always good, or that they're perfectly executed. It's just that it's a comfortable medium between "just like the old days" and "new ideas and good stuff" to keep the strengths of D&D and incorporate some good ideas that should have been there from the beginning. You can't alienate your old players (listen to all the grognards saying that 1st edition is better than 2nd edition, so why did we need a third edition). Also listen to all the people who say, "It's just like GURPS."
3rd Edition is neither, honestly. GURPS has far more versatile character generation, but the combat resolution system is not for a newbie. (I'm sure that if I were to have witnessed it in action, I might have learned it easier.) However, with the d20 system and a battlemap, I've mastered how to handle combat resolution without needing a demonstration. (I was the first person to DM a group in our area.)
(Oh, and for those that complain about Track being a feat -- that's because if it were a skill, then one of the main benefits of being a Ranger would be lost. Arguably, it could have been an exclusive skill, but making it a feat is a way of saying that despite having a high wisdom, you still will fail that wilderness lore.)
Finally, about contract-based-model, they are moving forward to use more freelance workers. As a programmer, I would prefer to work for a company so that I know I get paid, even if my project gets cancelled. Projects get cancelled. WotC is not going to make money maknig modules. They produced 9 small modules and the higher ups complained about having to do that all the ways. The whole point of the SRD/d20 license is so that small companies can handle that sort of thing. It's not profitable for a big company. But, going from 750 employees to 250 is frightening, especially given who they laid off.
From what I understand, they were offered nice severance packages. But, they still have a history at the company. Jeff Grubb has been there since 1st Edition, Skip Williams has been INVOLVED (not part of the company, but writing a rules advice column for Dragon) since then as well.
Hopefully, Skip will be hired by Paizo Publishing, who just recently bought the rights to publish Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Since WotC no longer owns those magazines, it means that a layoff from WotC can result in hiring by Paizo. We can all hope. (But then again, Paizo might not be able to afford him. They are a much smaller company.)
A lot of these guys go on to make their own companies, though. The d20 version of "open source" works much differently than the software Open Source. The d20 style results in many small companies that produce products with varying degrees of quality. (Some are EXTREMELY good, and some are EXTREMELY bad.) But, they're all out earning money.
Honestly, the way he presented it in that article seemed to be very close to what I've gathered to be PROBABLY true. He invented the concept of the dungeon-adventure, with medieval fighting man miniatures going into the dungeon.
Gygax made up the rules which said that you could have player class X, with Y hitpoints, etc. Arneson had the idea that the miniatures had hitpoints, etc. Gygax made the leap which said that the miniatures just represented the personalities. So, I would say Arneson is more correct to say he was the father of "adventure gaming" and not roleplaying.
Gygax and Arneson are both trumped for actual "father of roleplaying" however, by the inventor of the "Braunstein" adventures. (I think it was David Wesley.) These were wargames where players could assume the roles of "President of Local University" and "General of Allied Forces." You talked your way into and out of things. It was more of a "How to Host a Murder Mystery" style roleplaying game. Sort of a LARP with a wargame tossed in. That really smacks heavily of the "First roleplaying game."
Arneson is the first one to have a roleplaying campaign setting, but only the second or third to ever have a published campaign setting. (You get really fuzzy with what came first between "Greyhawk," "Blackmoor," and "Tekumel.") And when you come down to it, Tolkien's Middle Earth predated them all, was a richer background, and had all the information to set up a good RPG.
So, any amount of "me me me" is mostly unfounded. You can always trace back to someone who predated you. But, they're still forefathers. And if one of them wants to have enough of an ego to say, "I invented it all" then let them... As long as they said, "And all my buddies helped me a lot." Arneson usually credits Gygax pretty well. I've seen interviews where BOTH of them downplay each other's achievements, but they seem to be much more gracious nowadays.
I'm waiting to see a good interview by Steve Jackson about his involvement in the beginnings of RPGs. Steve Jackson sounds like a very interesting fellow. In fact, they all sound fascinating. But, SJ was the first of those old RPGers to realize what an impact that computers were going to have on RPGs. Some of the companies of today are just NOW realizing how important the computer is to the modern RPG. (Wizards can barely recognize it. For a company that big, their attention to their webpage is kind of a side gesture. If they put some serious moeny behind it, I would be very impressed by what those guys could do.)
The whole "origins of RPG" seems all misty to me. You can read interviews with Rob Kuntz, Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, and others... You get the impression that its a group of relatively good friends, with the typical tensions. You know, typical gaming group.
They come up with a cool idea. You never really know WHO was the one who came up with it. All of them claim to have varying levels of importance in the creation, and all of them have counter stories to each others stories. Some of them are under legal obligation not to reveal their side of the story anymore.
You know that Arneson was very involved. You also know he signed a legal document saying he's not going to argue with Gygax anymore, basically.
But, you do know that Gygax is the one who quit his job and started fixing shoes in order to get the game off the ground. No matter who created it, Gygax was the one who believed in it.
So, I'm pretty sure that I'll never get the story. But, it's definitely intriguing. I love these interviews, though. Makes me all misty eyed that I was too young to see the origins of RPGs. But then again, I'm young enough that I'll see a few generations more. (And I'm glad that I'm not so crusty that I'm unwilling to play the most excellent 3rd edition.) Here's over 20 years of gaming under my belt, and hopefully many many more to come.
Wizards no logner does this service, they outsourced it to Bastion Press. I'm thinking that Wizards will continue to sell them, but Bastion controls which ones will be scanned, in which order. I talked to Jim Butler there (God, I love excuses that let me email game designers) and unfortunately he says that he's tried to convince them to release a bunch on CD, but that they didn't go for it. So, mail the wizards people and politely ask them if they would be interested in making a CD chock full of these ESDs. It would be Oh So Cool! (I'd rather pay $100 for a ton of ESDs than pay $5 for one. I end up burning them on a CD myself anyhow.)
We do that in Win98/WinNT all the time. Of course, we also make sure to have the toolbar on autohide, minimized, and on the opposite side of the screen. We have all the icons renamed, or we have them dragged off the edge of the screen.
If you're really brave, a little registry tweaking can get it even scarier.
Of course, I no longer work at that company. Heh. (For different reasons, and we mostnly only really monkied with the "Crash and Burn" machines, which were regularly reformatted, used for testing misbehaving programs.)
I got one at my current employer. I would have been moving from a job I liked to a job I didn't like. So, I asked for a counter offer, which they originally weren't going to give because they felt that I should expand my career, etc. Then when they realized all the stuff that I did, they gave me one that was slightly under the other job's pay. So, I was disappointed, but considered it, and then took it.
Even today, I still don't make as much as I would have made at the other place. The main reason I turned it down is because the other job would have entailed programming in Access Basic, whereas here at least I get to do Visual Basic. It turned out that my counter-offer pay increase was considered my raise for the year. And since then, I've gotten one good raise, and one 0% raise. (Which has upset me terribly, enough to consider leaving again.) The only really good thing about it is that I've gotten a promotion out of it.
So, the success of this story is that my employer seems to believe I'll stick around for the long haul. So, they aren't worried about me being disloyal. But, on the other hand, it didn't improve things terribly much.
I know C++, I do not know the STL. The STL did not exist when I learned C++. I learned it back in 1992, when it was still being finalized. In addition, I never learned about namespaces, some of the rules changed, and a whole host of other problems. It makes it hard for me to convince people I know C++. I do. I use Rogue Wave and code in C++ sometimes. And I use Java other times. And perl. And VB. It makes it hard to keep everything perfectly straight, so it makes it hard for me to convince people I know C++ sometimes.
Heh. Everyone keeps talking about setting up my own server. Keep in mind that, despite being a programmer, I'm a guy running Windows 98 at home and Windows NT at work, who just wants to talk to coworkers and family members.
The JabberView solution sounds good, though. If there really is a good server out there with the capability, I'd switch to it. (I was using theoretic.com before.) I know that my coworkers might not ever switch, even the ones using Trillian. WinJab isn't pretty. Someone really needs to go visit the Trillian developers and convince them of the beauty of Jabber, so that they can add to the effort. Their client is "pretty" and their interoperability is rather solid.
I agree with you, but I disagree with one point. By signing up with MSN and Yahoo, I've opened up channels to me from people who only use MSN or Yahoo. Believe it or not, there are people out there like that. (which I'm assuming you do believe). I never use their proprietary features. File transfer, voice chat, group communication, etc. None of it is my main concern. I want a simple message capability. For Jabber to be useful for me, it must communicate with AIM and ICQ. AOL is the villain here, I already know that. I've been so utterly tempted to boycott Time Warner/AOL due to their handling of the situation "Other IM's cannot connect to our servers, it means lost revenue." (Well, a boycott could mean even more lost revenue.) But, I also need them for work. (Manager is an AIM user.)
I'd gladly campaign for moving my department over to Jabber, so we could have an internal server for it. BUT, with it lacking AIM/ICQ support, I'd have a harder time selling it to my other coworkers who aren't fired up about it. (Who want to talk to their wife/aunt/father/whatever who are single IM client users). Jabber either needs to maintain that compatbility to take off, not just to "ease migration."
For those who have responded: Thanks very much! I will definitely look back into WinJab, since I just prefer the Jabber solution. The interoperability is important to me, unfortunately. For Jabber to take off, it either needs a larger base of users (hook the moms and pops) or it needs to operate with those IMs which already have the moms and pops hooked. But, I just prefer the philosophy of Jabber better.
Oh, and for the record: I used theoretic.com for my server. The operator (theo) has been so tremendously helpful that I used it, when Jabber.com and Jabber.org were too flooded to be useful for me.
I've played around with the jabber module in Perl, which was pretty easy to use.
Jabber started to disappoint when they stopped supporting AIM/ICQ. I don't know if it's permanent, I don't actually know if it's still not supported. But, since AIM is what I have to use for work (otherwise, I would still just be using ICQ to talk to my friends), I needed something that could stay connected.
I use Trillian now. It still does ICQ/AIM as well as IRC/MSN/Y!, which is why I need something like this, but it doesn't provide source code (which I only really want for the principle of it) and it doesn't support Jabber's protocol. (They're talking about releasing an API for writing plugins. At least it's free (as in beer). (I've got a few of my coworkers switched from AIM to Trillian...) Hopefully Jabber will fix up the connectivity issues (or have ALREADY fixed them up.) gosh, I should download WinJab again and check.
I got really excited about Jabber for the longest time. I'm sort of disappointed in it now, since it seems like they're still having problems connecting to AIM and ICQ. The AIM connection is the most vital for me, since our department uses AIM to send short quick messages to each other. Most of the people here are using AIM's own client, but I started to use Jabber so that I could talk to my friends on ICQ. (And promptly signed up for MSN and Yahoo, so I could catch everyone from everywhere.) Now I use Trillian, which only disappoints me by neither providing source code (which I only want for the principle of it) nor supporting Jabber itself (which does kind of bug me).
I was waiting for someone to mention that movie. Watched it last night, come in and see the Slashdot story about being able to break previously unbreakable codes.
Of course, all the other technological gaffes are still there. (For now.) My future roommate was mocking me because she thought it was funny that I was pointing out little holes. I imagine she'll mock me more when it turns out that at least one of them is possibly not a hole. (Though, screens that morph from garbled text into clear text via graphics is still funny.)
That was because TAG was made here in the 313. TAG was better than Telegard in many ways, in the early days, back when Carl Mueller ran it. But, TAG had a tremendous problem of using .CHN files (a Turbo Pascal artifact where your "currently unused" routines were stored on disk, and only loaded when needed). Swapping to .CHN files was much slower than Telegard's "Always in memory" model, since Telegard ran with the assumption that the SysOp would have more than 64k free memory. (Yes, 64k. TAG used a .COM file then.)
When Eric Oman started working on Telegard, he was a spitfire of energy. Amazing, just amazing. It was almost like an open source project: "Hey, Eric, can you add THIS new feature?" Poof. It would be there. (Surprised the hell out of me when I found out he was only about 12 or 13 at the time...) I got to be one of his Beta sites, and got to play with the source code (nothing of mine of import is in the BBS anymore).
I was out of BBSs by the time Tim Strike took over Telegard again, but it definitely looked like a step in the right direction, but by that time Cott Lang got ahold of the source code that a buddy of mine took from my disk box and posted on a lot of BBSs. (He was trying to hurt Telegard, for some odd reason.)
This story and more amusing Telegard nostalgia is available on e2: I miss BBSs, Telegard.
Oh. And wow. I just checked the Timeline of the article above. And um. Wow. Martin Pollard lost it back then. I knew he had "retired" from the programming of Telegard, but I never did catch his "farewell" letter - I was too busy in college at the time. Check it out: Martin says "goodbye"
This sounded like it was going to be a neat technology. I got myself a CueCat and tried it out for a while, but it did seem a little too overhyped and a little too "head in the clouds."
It's too bad that the story was audio only. some of us may not have sound cards or may be at work where we can't listen to such. Heh.
Yeh, I had to sign an NDA after working a call center .. It was a lot like that, though. I learned some neat tricks. Like how to make your calls last EXACTLY the amount of time you needed.
Tech support makes you evil. It makes you do things like get the customer angry, he'll want to speak to YOUR maanger -- and you don't get in trouble, because, well... You're GOOD at it. Or format their hard drive... It takes a while, and thy can call back later.)
My call times were excellent. The person with the best call times got two movie passes. I earned six (they never gave them to me, though).
My managers played even weirder games. They fired people who were looking for other jobs. firing people looks "Good" ... having people leave because they're unhappy is "Bad." They'd fired people for being 5 minutes late from work. Another friend was fired for violating the "NDA" because on his PERSONAL HOME PAGE he had a recording of a customer getting upset with a tech. (The call center for this was in Arizona). They accused him of recording a call (HOW?) ... And the technician wasn't him, and the conversation metnioned the call center being where we didn't have an office. It was very scary.
I never got the "You're fired" on your last day of the job like most other techs did. I found the secret... If you're polite to the boss when you're leaving, and your reason is "Professional Advancement" (I went back to being a programmer -- I had temporarily forgotten that programmers are in demand, and worked customer support) then they get a good review.
I'm just SCARED to see the numbers my supervisors were rated on. I can understand the "computer with the numbers blinking." But, having to fire people for being 5 minutes late from lunch (inside the building) GAH!
One nice thing about Pike is that its based on LPC, which if any of you are LPMudders, can be a good thing. A lot of us wasted a lot of our college (and post college) years programming in LPC ... and then to suddenly have that skill turn into something useful. Whoooiie!