Or try another game, like Dark Age of Camelot. EQ runs on the mistaken impression that more time played is better. It is possible to make a game where you can have fun in half an hour or an hour here or there. Even the biggest raids in DAOC can be done in an hour and a half with good organisation, and you can get some decent Realm vs Realm fighting action in as little as 15 minutes...while EQ can take an hour just to get into combat for 50+ level character. Dying in RvR costs you nothing but 5 minutes of res sickness; there's no long corpse recoveries. Even for XP deaths, you can just accept the XP hit and forget about your tombstone. The philosophy of EQ is exploitive; at some point, they forgot that these people were customers. Their slogan says it all: "You're in our world now!" Personally, I've got too many other things I want to do to be tied to a large raid for hours at a time. A game should bend to my schedule, not the other way around. Mythic still hasn't forgotten that they're working for their players.
Problems with paired programming often have more to do with the programmers than with the methodology.
Working in pairs often throws you up against your own worse faults, including the worst fault of all, coder arrogance. For a lot of programmers, the most expensive piece of equipment they have is that huge, bloated ego they haul in with them every day. Having someone question what you do is a very good way of breaking bad habits. And good programmers do work well with others; the faster programmer gains the benefit of a second pair of eyes to catch simple mistakes, while the second programmer is brought up to speed on the project.
Paired programming becomes very painful when there are a lot of bad habits on one or both sides, combined with prickly egos. But these are people who won't perform well under any methodology. I've worked with developers who seemed to be stars on their own, but who propogated side effects and errors through the project because they just didn't care about working with the rest of the team. In the end they amounted to less than zero, because the resources spent fixing the damage they did outweighed their contributions. Had they really been working on their own, they might have been as good as they claimed to be, but the days of the single programmer project are long past.
My experience is that consoles excel at eye-hand coordination, arcade style games, but fall flat for strategy, sim games, and RTS's which require large game states, complex AI, and complex controls. For MMORPG's, quick responses require a large number of key mappings, hotkeys, macros, and message typing, none of which you can do with any kind of reasonable response time through any of the standard controllers. I enjoy consoles for playing head to head, but looking at the list of games I really want to play, I find that none of them are really portable to a console. Despite the lower cost of a console, I still can't justify it based upon how little I would actually use it.
Talk about sticking your neck out...
on
e-Denounce
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· Score: 1
Guess who just became the #1 candidate for DOS attacks. I notice that I can't connect to their site. I'm no fan of DOS attacks, but this is just asking for it. Any server that this plug-in links to will be locked 24/7.
I've added these sites to my favourites list. I've been collecting stuff on Scientology for years.
Add these sites to your favourites list, and put a link from you website if you have one. Urge everyone else to do the same. The best way to fight these guys is to make these attempts backfire.
The RIAA and MPAA are full of it if they're claiming that computers represent the first method of copying music without paying. Years ago I kept my little tape recorder plugged into my radio, on pause; when a song I liked came on, I took it off pause. I could also plug the tape deck into a record player to tape borrowed albums. I filled dozens of tapes this way, made some wicked mixed tapes, and never bought an album till I was in my late teens--I just couldn't afford them. I was by no means unique, almost everyone I knew at the time did this. Copying has been going on for 30 years--and suddenly we have a crisis?!? This is bullshit, plain and simple.
No one seems to realize that infinite growth, the fantasy that most economic plans seem to be based upon the fantasy of infinite consumption and infinite resources. When I worked for a dot com, the thing that struck me over and over again was that there was often no real use to what we or other dot coms were producing. Think about it: clothes, housing, refrigerators, automobiles--the main products of the old economy--were things of obvious value. But do you really need an appliance that cooks only wieners? Do you really need the internet on your cel-phone? Do you really need most of the miscellaneous toys and gadgets pouring out of our factories, or most of the software that's being written? Congratulations, we're efficicient, we're productive, so damned productive that now the big challenge isn't to make it, it's to sell it once we've made it.
A few years ago the G7 committed themselves to the pursuit of the four day work week, not because everyone wanted more time off, but because we are reaching the point that we cannot consume all we make. This does not necessarily mean that we are all rich; in fact, it can mean quite the opposite. When we get to that point, competition, even in the old, reliable blue chip industries becomes so cutthroat that profit margins are miniscule and workloads are insane. Investors go scrambling wildly to put money into something that people might actually want. The gap between haves and have-nots widens, because huge surpluses drive the prices of some goods and services down to untenable levels, while the price of the few remaining goods and services considered rare becomes astronomical. Employees are laid off in droves, sales becomes more important than production, investment becomes speculative and high risk, and the economy keeps lurching up onto a cloud and falling back to earth...
Frankly, I don't really have anything going over the internet or the phone that I care to hide, but who is going to do all this watching? It takes time to look over all this material and decide whether it's terrorist related. Who has the time to do this?
Terrorist activities aren't going to be hidden by encryption or civil rights, but by the sheer volume or material. If they have a way to narrow it down to likely suspects, great. If they're actually monitoring my phone and email, they're so far off base that they'll never find a terrorist.
The benefits to be gained depend on who is doing the snooping. If they waste time compiling huge dossiers on innocent people, the way J. Edgar Hoover did, then the mass of useless information will drive the noise to signal ratio up so high that relevant information will be buried. Real terrorists will just keep quiet and slip through, and all this will be for nothing.
While wall-to-wall carpet bombing is very tempting, it probably won't achieve the purpose. What is needed is a different kind of war, involving small teams or individuals; almost a war of assassins. There is an overabundant supply of naive and angry civilians eager to become martyrs and shed blood for the cause. Mass destruction tends to make more of them. Look around you. What we need to do is put a well aimed bullet into the brain of the guy who thought this up. He probably wasn't planning to die. And any one who is planning to take his place will think twice about it.
We don't want to nuke them. We want to whack them.
Unfortunately, this probably won't be all that useful to the military, since there are fairly simple ways to harden targets against it. It will be most effective against civilian targets, which makes it the ideal weapon for...terrorists! Imagine one of these going off on Wall Street, and you get the idea. This is old technology, but the practical application probably should have been left undeveloped.
Naw, I'm serious! A C64 palmtop with a card for secondary storage, maybe a USB port for communications. The biggest ticket item on it would be the screen, the rest could be stuck on one chip, and think of all the software that exists for it already. And it was such a ball to code on...
Slashdot Mirror
Or try another game, like Dark Age of Camelot. EQ runs on the mistaken impression that more time played is better. It is possible to make a game where you can have fun in half an hour or an hour here or there. Even the biggest raids in DAOC can be done in an hour and a half with good organisation, and you can get some decent Realm vs Realm fighting action in as little as 15 minutes...while EQ can take an hour just to get into combat for 50+ level character. Dying in RvR costs you nothing but 5 minutes of res sickness; there's no long corpse recoveries. Even for XP deaths, you can just accept the XP hit and forget about your tombstone. The philosophy of EQ is exploitive; at some point, they forgot that these people were customers. Their slogan says it all: "You're in our world now!" Personally, I've got too many other things I want to do to be tied to a large raid for hours at a time. A game should bend to my schedule, not the other way around. Mythic still hasn't forgotten that they're working for their players.
Problems with paired programming often have more to do with the programmers than with the methodology.
Working in pairs often throws you up against your own worse faults, including the worst fault of all, coder arrogance. For a lot of programmers, the most expensive piece of equipment they have is that huge, bloated ego they haul in with them every day. Having someone question what you do is a very good way of breaking bad habits. And good programmers do work well with others; the faster programmer gains the benefit of a second pair of eyes to catch simple mistakes, while the second programmer is brought up to speed on the project.
Paired programming becomes very painful when there are a lot of bad habits on one or both sides, combined with prickly egos. But these are people who won't perform well under any methodology. I've worked with developers who seemed to be stars on their own, but who propogated side effects and errors through the project because they just didn't care about working with the rest of the team. In the end they amounted to less than zero, because the resources spent fixing the damage they did outweighed their contributions. Had they really been working on their own, they might have been as good as they claimed to be, but the days of the single programmer project are long past.
My experience is that consoles excel at eye-hand coordination, arcade style games, but fall flat for strategy, sim games, and RTS's which require large game states, complex AI, and complex controls. For MMORPG's, quick responses require a large number of key mappings, hotkeys, macros, and message typing, none of which you can do with any kind of reasonable response time through any of the standard controllers. I enjoy consoles for playing head to head, but looking at the list of games I really want to play, I find that none of them are really portable to a console. Despite the lower cost of a console, I still can't justify it based upon how little I would actually use it.
Guess who just became the #1 candidate for DOS attacks. I notice that I can't connect to their site. I'm no fan of DOS attacks, but this is just asking for it. Any server that this plug-in links to will be locked 24/7.
Dumb, dumb, dumb...
I've added these sites to my favourites list. I've been collecting stuff on Scientology for years.
Add these sites to your favourites list, and put a link from you website if you have one. Urge everyone else to do the same. The best way to fight these guys is to make these attempts backfire.
The RIAA and MPAA are full of it if they're claiming that computers represent the first method of copying music without paying. Years ago I kept my little tape recorder plugged into my radio, on pause; when a song I liked came on, I took it off pause. I could also plug the tape deck into a record player to tape borrowed albums. I filled dozens of tapes this way, made some wicked mixed tapes, and never bought an album till I was in my late teens--I just couldn't afford them. I was by no means unique, almost everyone I knew at the time did this. Copying has been going on for 30 years--and suddenly we have a crisis?!? This is bullshit, plain and simple.
No one seems to realize that infinite growth, the fantasy that most economic plans seem to be based upon the fantasy of infinite consumption and infinite resources. When I worked for a dot com, the thing that struck me over and over again was that there was often no real use to what we or other dot coms were producing. Think about it: clothes, housing, refrigerators, automobiles--the main products of the old economy--were things of obvious value. But do you really need an appliance that cooks only wieners? Do you really need the internet on your cel-phone? Do you really need most of the miscellaneous toys and gadgets pouring out of our factories, or most of the software that's being written? Congratulations, we're efficicient, we're productive, so damned productive that now the big challenge isn't to make it, it's to sell it once we've made it.
A few years ago the G7 committed themselves to the pursuit of the four day work week, not because everyone wanted more time off, but because we are reaching the point that we cannot consume all we make. This does not necessarily mean that we are all rich; in fact, it can mean quite the opposite. When we get to that point, competition, even in the old, reliable blue chip industries becomes so cutthroat that profit margins are miniscule and workloads are insane. Investors go scrambling wildly to put money into something that people might actually want. The gap between haves and have-nots widens, because huge surpluses drive the prices of some goods and services down to untenable levels, while the price of the few remaining goods and services considered rare becomes astronomical. Employees are laid off in droves, sales becomes more important than production, investment becomes speculative and high risk, and the economy keeps lurching up onto a cloud and falling back to earth...
Sound familiar?
Frankly, I don't really have anything going over the internet or the phone that I care to hide, but who is going to do all this watching? It takes time to look over all this material and decide whether it's terrorist related. Who has the time to do this?
Terrorist activities aren't going to be hidden by encryption or civil rights, but by the sheer volume or material. If they have a way to narrow it down to likely suspects, great. If they're actually monitoring my phone and email, they're so far off base that they'll never find a terrorist.
The benefits to be gained depend on who is doing the snooping. If they waste time compiling huge dossiers on innocent people, the way J. Edgar Hoover did, then the mass of useless information will drive the noise to signal ratio up so high that relevant information will be buried. Real terrorists will just keep quiet and slip through, and all this will be for nothing.
The first shot will drop the plane. Depressurization and rupture, remember?
And we haven't even mentioned air rage.
While wall-to-wall carpet bombing is very tempting, it probably won't achieve the purpose. What is needed is a different kind of war, involving small teams or individuals; almost a war of assassins. There is an overabundant supply of naive and angry civilians eager to become martyrs and shed blood for the cause. Mass destruction tends to make more of them. Look around you. What we need to do is put a well aimed bullet into the brain of the guy who thought this up. He probably wasn't planning to die. And any one who is planning to take his place will think twice about it.
We don't want to nuke them. We want to whack them.
Unfortunately, this probably won't be all that useful to the military, since there are fairly simple ways to harden targets against it. It will be most effective against civilian targets, which makes it the ideal weapon for...terrorists! Imagine one of these going off on Wall Street, and you get the idea. This is old technology, but the practical application probably should have been left undeveloped.
Naw, I'm serious! A C64 palmtop with a card for secondary storage, maybe a USB port for communications. The biggest ticket item on it would be the screen, the rest could be stuck on one chip, and think of all the software that exists for it already. And it was such a ball to code on...