Can you recommend a resource for learning personal skills and politics?
a)Be competent. You need to have a certain level of knowledge just to be able to ask the right questions. b)Be friendly and helpful. This will allow you to c)Work with people who are competent and learn from them.
You should know some technical things yourself. Become an expert in at least one area (or a good generalist). But since you can't be an expert in everything (if you did, you'd be the founder of the company instead of asking for advice on Slashdot) you should at least know who knows the things you don't know.
The president is not immune. It's a jurisdictional issue. The Constitution clearly states that Congress, not the judicial branch, has the authority to remove the president from office. This small thing keeps overzealous, often unelected, individuals of the judicial branch from interfering with the executive branch.
One important benefit of our historical reluctance to prosecute our presidents is the peaceful transition of power. Some countries have imprisoned or even executed their former executives in the name of justice. This, however, gives too much incentive to their leaders to not let go of power.
It's not the judge's prerogative to rule over the executive branch. The Constitution specifically grants Congress the authority to judge the President via impeachment, not the courts.
If you're into user-interface, I highly recommend the book Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by S. M. Casey. It's a collection of true and entertaining short stories about how poor user interface can lead to horrible disaster. Only about one or two of the stories are software specific, but the general lessons learned can apply to any kind of design, including software. Very interesting.
I picked that statement for a reason. To some extent I want to specifically exclude old farts like you
You'd be the perfect target for an age discrimination lawsuit.
Also, you'll never know how valuable good experienced software engineers are until you've worked with a few. It's really your loss more than it is theirs.
C first. It is the lingua franca of the Unix world. Even if you don't use it for yourself, you have to understand it because so much is written in it. And if you don't understand it, no one will take you seriously. One of my first Linux installs was so I could teach myself C cheaply and I needed a free, as in beer, compiler.
Then after that, any language that you think might be interesting. Try multiple languages. I personally like Ada and there's a free GNAT Ada compiler for Linux.
You will bypass all legal hurdles if you buy the company you work for first. Come up with a business plan, get a loan and make an offer. As a bonus you legally get the current customer list.
they didn't want to actually have to haggle and trade.
Meh. In Warcraft, there still are people doing the WTB, WTS thing for various reasons, and indeed, nothing in the game prevents you from doing so. The auction house is just an option for those who care more about adventuring than about standing around town chatting. Nothing wrong with this. If you want to build a community, just organize 5-man groups for dungeons. You'll meet a lot of people that way.
"but if we do allow it where do we draw the mark so as to have a completely faked photo like the one of Kim Jong Il"
A disclaimer stating that the image of the general was enhanced and the background was replaced by a flag that wasn't in the original shot would be sufficient. It's OK to make a picture look better, just don't try to pass it off as an original.
Warhammer wins in "World" group PvP. Take keeps and such all the way up to the enemy capital city, kind of a combination of PvP and PvE. For WoW players, think Alterac Valley when it was still fun x1000.
Pure PvE Raiding is still way better in WoW. Taking keeps and such in RvR is raid-like, but the NPCs don't have the kind of scripted goodness Blizzard's bosses do, the real challenge (other than organization) comes if the other side's players try to defend. WAR does have a couple of "real" end game boss fights but, from what I've read, it's more like Onyxia or Gruul where you get right to the boss without much in between (except the RvR required to take the enemy capital city and open those dungeons).
Solo questing and instanced PvP (battlegrouds/scenarios) are about the same in each, slight edge to WAR because it's new and shiny.
Group questing... WoW has *much* better PvE dungeons (WAR has instanced dungeons, but not to the scale and quality WoW does), but Warhammer has better outside quests for groups (public quests) and taking minor objective points in RvR feels like a group quest (take out the NPC guards then claim the objective for your side).
If the idea of PvP usually turns you off, but you like to do PvE with groups (like raiding), you may like WAR anyway as taking major objectives in RvR (like keeps) is less like "omgwtfpwnedbbq" and more like a raid in the sense that you get a large group together focused on an objective and you have to figure out and execute a plan to capture/defend that objective to be successful. To take a keep, you need to defeat the NPC keep lord (boss) who is protected by NPC guards (feels like a simple WoW raid boss fight) and sometimes by enemy players too (which turns it into a complex WoW raid boss fight).
The one real Achilles' heal in WAR is server population. If you join an empty server it will feel lonely and you'll probably hate it. If you join a populated server there's a good chance you'll enjoy it.
Summary: If you wish you could play a *Super Epic* Alterac Valley, play WAR. If you prefer interesting scripted boss fights, play WoW. If you have free time, at least try both and judge for yourself.
In chess, you agree to the contest by playing the game. Same as in EVE.
Not really. In Eve they say you can mine. But if you do then someone else with a fighter, not a mining ship, just steals what you've mined. Unless you have 2 accounts. Apparently we haven't agreed to the same game. The solo fighter is always able to beat the solo miner at the mining game. Is this fun or fair for the solo miner? No. Now if the game were all 0.0 and there was no such thing as a mining ship or PvE missions and the game was sold as a pure PvP fighter vs. fighter game, then you'd be correct.
Do you consider the person who beats you in a game of chess, a griefer? I mean, they're taking your pieces away.
Not at all. In chess both sides agree to the start of the contest. Both sides are basically even. And if you lose and play again, both sides start even again. As a bonus, you can complete an entire game in one sitting. None of these things are true with Eve.
And to be honest, the only thing you really lose in Eve is real life time... but you don't gain real life time by "winning" either. The best cost/benefit ratio of time spent to fun played isn't a zero-sum MMO.
Mining was a mostly relaxing way to waste time. Sure I got upset when some griefer stole ore from me, but I wouldn't say I got "pissed", so much as it made me realize the game rules were made for griefers and I had no part in it since my idea of fun isn't taking away someone else's. It's not like I didn't try fighting back, like I would NPCs in other games, but a basic mining ship is not going to take out a fighter.
It doesn't matter. Every other part of the game I played seemed pointless too. Running missions starts out fun, but gets boring because it's so repetitive. Waiting for people to undock or go through a gate or looking for groups to fight in PvP that you actually have a chance of beating, or alternatively running away, isn't fun. If you're claiming there's tons of action in PvP, well, that didn't seem to be the case when I tried it. And forming huge corps to build big things... well, that seemed kinda pointless too. Who cares if you have a big ship. Sure it looks cool, but ok I've got a big ship, now what? I suppose there is some fun in griefing others by stealing their ore, or looking for miners in low/no sec to ransom, or going around in groups and just ganking whoever you could find, but it seems like that would get boring too.
As far as group PvP, MMOs just suck in general (for people with real life commitments) because of the imbalance (mostly rewarding time played and getting groups of people together with lots of free time over everything else). I'd much rather play a straight FPS where I can get on any time, join mostly balanced teams (by design if not skill) and have pure fun for the 30 minutes or whatever I have to play, from the time I log on to the time I log off.
No problem. I tried Eve. I found that the only way to beat the game, if griefing is not your style, is to not play. The game is made for griefers and, at it's core, is nothing more than an unbalanced pvp game. The few times one of the corps I joined pvped, it was mind numbingly boring (space is big). And when I was solo trying to mine, well, there was no point really. The missions get old. Honestly, if all the carebears would use some common sense and stay away, the pirates would have nothing left to do and the game would die. Pirates never fight on even terms (they always hide when out gunned), which means if there were only pirates, they'd either be waiting out other pirates that were hiding (boring) or they'd be hiding themselves from bigger pirates (also boring).
But rules and formality are never a substitute for an actual human thinking about what makes sense. Written formal process ends up being an impediment to getting work done *and* followed only in word, not spirit.
And thinking about what makes sense is no substitute for a good test team trying to prove you wrong. Everything has a time and place. The formality of testing everything (within reason) before release is a good formality. The formality of specifying interfaces, hardware specs and user requirements is a good formality.
McCain is the only politician with the balls to stand up against the Agriculture lobby in congress. Most educated people in the world realize our ethanol subsidies are raising the cost of food for the world's poor. And our other crop subsidies and import restrictions undermine the ability of 3rd world countries to develop strong agriculture markets.
All of these subsidies and import restrictions come back to Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions. Obama is for these subsidies and the status quo. McCain is against them and is the real candidate for change.
I see what you're saying and I mostly agree. I don't see the focus on combat as inherently bad as far as a "rules system" goes, but hopefully the holes will be filled by lore books, magazine articles, fiction, etc... If not, it will depend on good players and DMs to create a compelling world that's consistent with the combat rules in spirit but doesn't involve killing bunnies to accomplish a goal that has nothing to do with killing bunnies. My hope is that the lack of focus on the out of combat aspects of the game in the rulebooks will lead to more freedom and imagination in the non-combat portions of the game and not an elimination of them. *shrug*
However, the game, imo, seriously suffers on the role-playing side. Non-combat skills are all but gone, character abilities are designed solely for their tactical interest in combat with little thought to justifying them in the game or whether they make the remotest sense and playing with table-top miniatures is all but compulsory now.
There still are a hand full of non-combat skills, such as diplomacy and knowledge. But I think the general feeling is the "fluff rules" for non-combat weren't really needed. Do you really need rules to say how long it takes to make a non-magical weapon or how much money you could make playing an instrument in a medium sized village for a given skill roll? Or could you just work it out with the DM and agree on something reasonable for the type of campaign and setting you're in? The later option seems quicker (no need to look it up in a rulebook), less distracting for the other players and truer to the concept of role-playing. Resolving combat is where rules provide the most bang for the buck.
I love your comment! When I took my first ASM course, I also related it to BASIC. Memory offsets -> line numbers, jumps -> GOTOs, function calls (special case of jump) -> GOSUB, etc...
Hooray BASIC!
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
As a programmer, *I* find it more readable as well. This doesn't matter when writing your own small program from scratch, but it's damn convenient when you've got to maintain someone else's code. You can do fewer "clever" things in Ada.
Suppose we want to assign b to a, then execute c if b is non-zero:
In C:
if (a=b) c;
It is clever. But can easily be misread as a comparison between a and b instead of an assignment. Obviously (or maybe not) good programmers won't write this way, but C allows it and you don't always get to choose who wrote the code you're currently working with. And this is just a trivial example. It can get far more complex and clever than I'm willing to attempt.
Ada doesn't let you be that clever. You're forced to write it out:
a:= b; IF b/= 0 THEN
c; END IF;
Now pretend someone else wrote this and you don't know the original goal of the code segment. You're not even sure if the code is 100% correct or not. Which one would you rather maintain?
"Also, most low level issues are horribly badly documented (such as calling conventions), and there are no shift operators, meaning that your code will be littered with X / 2**Y (making the code more or less unreadable), there is also no way to properly do an arithmetic shift in Ada on a modular type."
Check out the "interfaces" package included with the language. It has all of these things (at least in Ada95).
Slashdot Mirror
a)Be competent. You need to have a certain level of knowledge just to be able to ask the right questions.
b)Be friendly and helpful.
This will allow you to
c)Work with people who are competent and learn from them.
You should know some technical things yourself. Become an expert in at least one area (or a good generalist). But since you can't be an expert in everything (if you did, you'd be the founder of the company instead of asking for advice on Slashdot) you should at least know who knows the things you don't know.
The president is not immune. It's a jurisdictional issue. The Constitution clearly states that Congress, not the judicial branch, has the authority to remove the president from office. This small thing keeps overzealous, often unelected, individuals of the judicial branch from interfering with the executive branch.
One important benefit of our historical reluctance to prosecute our presidents is the peaceful transition of power. Some countries have imprisoned or even executed their former executives in the name of justice. This, however, gives too much incentive to their leaders to not let go of power.
It's not the judge's prerogative to rule over the executive branch. The Constitution specifically grants Congress the authority to judge the President via impeachment, not the courts.
If you're into user-interface, I highly recommend the book Set Phasers on Stun: And Other True Tales of Design, Technology, and Human Error by S. M. Casey. It's a collection of true and entertaining short stories about how poor user interface can lead to horrible disaster. Only about one or two of the stories are software specific, but the general lessons learned can apply to any kind of design, including software. Very interesting.
I picked that statement for a reason. To some extent I want to specifically exclude old farts like you
You'd be the perfect target for an age discrimination lawsuit.
Also, you'll never know how valuable good experienced software engineers are until you've worked with a few. It's really your loss more than it is theirs.
No, the question is: "Is x the best choice?"
C first. It is the lingua franca of the Unix world. Even if you don't use it for yourself, you have to understand it because so much is written in it. And if you don't understand it, no one will take you seriously. One of my first Linux installs was so I could teach myself C cheaply and I needed a free, as in beer, compiler.
Then after that, any language that you think might be interesting. Try multiple languages. I personally like Ada and there's a free GNAT Ada compiler for Linux.
"nad clobber them full stop"
You will bypass all legal hurdles if you buy the company you work for first. Come up with a business plan, get a loan and make an offer. As a bonus you legally get the current customer list.
Meh. In Warcraft, there still are people doing the WTB, WTS thing for various reasons, and indeed, nothing in the game prevents you from doing so. The auction house is just an option for those who care more about adventuring than about standing around town chatting. Nothing wrong with this. If you want to build a community, just organize 5-man groups for dungeons. You'll meet a lot of people that way.
"but if we do allow it where do we draw the mark so as to have a completely faked photo like the one of Kim Jong Il"
A disclaimer stating that the image of the general was enhanced and the background was replaced by a flag that wasn't in the original shot would be sufficient. It's OK to make a picture look better, just don't try to pass it off as an original.
Warhammer wins in "World" group PvP. Take keeps and such all the way up to the enemy capital city, kind of a combination of PvP and PvE. For WoW players, think Alterac Valley when it was still fun x1000.
Pure PvE Raiding is still way better in WoW. Taking keeps and such in RvR is raid-like, but the NPCs don't have the kind of scripted goodness Blizzard's bosses do, the real challenge (other than organization) comes if the other side's players try to defend. WAR does have a couple of "real" end game boss fights but, from what I've read, it's more like Onyxia or Gruul where you get right to the boss without much in between (except the RvR required to take the enemy capital city and open those dungeons).
Solo questing and instanced PvP (battlegrouds/scenarios) are about the same in each, slight edge to WAR because it's new and shiny.
Group questing ... WoW has *much* better PvE dungeons (WAR has instanced dungeons, but not to the scale and quality WoW does), but Warhammer has better outside quests for groups (public quests) and taking minor objective points in RvR feels like a group quest (take out the NPC guards then claim the objective for your side).
If the idea of PvP usually turns you off, but you like to do PvE with groups (like raiding), you may like WAR anyway as taking major objectives in RvR (like keeps) is less like "omgwtfpwnedbbq" and more like a raid in the sense that you get a large group together focused on an objective and you have to figure out and execute a plan to capture/defend that objective to be successful. To take a keep, you need to defeat the NPC keep lord (boss) who is protected by NPC guards (feels like a simple WoW raid boss fight) and sometimes by enemy players too (which turns it into a complex WoW raid boss fight).
The one real Achilles' heal in WAR is server population. If you join an empty server it will feel lonely and you'll probably hate it. If you join a populated server there's a good chance you'll enjoy it.
Summary: If you wish you could play a *Super Epic* Alterac Valley, play WAR. If you prefer interesting scripted boss fights, play WoW. If you have free time, at least try both and judge for yourself.
Not really. In Eve they say you can mine. But if you do then someone else with a fighter, not a mining ship, just steals what you've mined. Unless you have 2 accounts. Apparently we haven't agreed to the same game. The solo fighter is always able to beat the solo miner at the mining game. Is this fun or fair for the solo miner? No. Now if the game were all 0.0 and there was no such thing as a mining ship or PvE missions and the game was sold as a pure PvP fighter vs. fighter game, then you'd be correct.
Not at all. In chess both sides agree to the start of the contest. Both sides are basically even. And if you lose and play again, both sides start even again. As a bonus, you can complete an entire game in one sitting. None of these things are true with Eve.
And to be honest, the only thing you really lose in Eve is real life time... but you don't gain real life time by "winning" either. The best cost/benefit ratio of time spent to fun played isn't a zero-sum MMO.
Mining was a mostly relaxing way to waste time. Sure I got upset when some griefer stole ore from me, but I wouldn't say I got "pissed", so much as it made me realize the game rules were made for griefers and I had no part in it since my idea of fun isn't taking away someone else's. It's not like I didn't try fighting back, like I would NPCs in other games, but a basic mining ship is not going to take out a fighter.
It doesn't matter. Every other part of the game I played seemed pointless too. Running missions starts out fun, but gets boring because it's so repetitive. Waiting for people to undock or go through a gate or looking for groups to fight in PvP that you actually have a chance of beating, or alternatively running away, isn't fun. If you're claiming there's tons of action in PvP, well, that didn't seem to be the case when I tried it. And forming huge corps to build big things... well, that seemed kinda pointless too. Who cares if you have a big ship. Sure it looks cool, but ok I've got a big ship, now what? I suppose there is some fun in griefing others by stealing their ore, or looking for miners in low/no sec to ransom, or going around in groups and just ganking whoever you could find, but it seems like that would get boring too.
As far as group PvP, MMOs just suck in general (for people with real life commitments) because of the imbalance (mostly rewarding time played and getting groups of people together with lots of free time over everything else). I'd much rather play a straight FPS where I can get on any time, join mostly balanced teams (by design if not skill) and have pure fun for the 30 minutes or whatever I have to play, from the time I log on to the time I log off.
No problem. I tried Eve. I found that the only way to beat the game, if griefing is not your style, is to not play. The game is made for griefers and, at it's core, is nothing more than an unbalanced pvp game. The few times one of the corps I joined pvped, it was mind numbingly boring (space is big). And when I was solo trying to mine, well, there was no point really. The missions get old. Honestly, if all the carebears would use some common sense and stay away, the pirates would have nothing left to do and the game would die. Pirates never fight on even terms (they always hide when out gunned), which means if there were only pirates, they'd either be waiting out other pirates that were hiding (boring) or they'd be hiding themselves from bigger pirates (also boring).
And thinking about what makes sense is no substitute for a good test team trying to prove you wrong. Everything has a time and place. The formality of testing everything (within reason) before release is a good formality. The formality of specifying interfaces, hardware specs and user requirements is a good formality.
McCain is the only politician with the balls to stand up against the Agriculture lobby in congress. Most educated people in the world realize our ethanol subsidies are raising the cost of food for the world's poor. And our other crop subsidies and import restrictions undermine the ability of 3rd world countries to develop strong agriculture markets.
All of these subsidies and import restrictions come back to Congressmen in the form of campaign contributions. Obama is for these subsidies and the status quo. McCain is against them and is the real candidate for change.
I see what you're saying and I mostly agree. I don't see the focus on combat as inherently bad as far as a "rules system" goes, but hopefully the holes will be filled by lore books, magazine articles, fiction, etc... If not, it will depend on good players and DMs to create a compelling world that's consistent with the combat rules in spirit but doesn't involve killing bunnies to accomplish a goal that has nothing to do with killing bunnies. My hope is that the lack of focus on the out of combat aspects of the game in the rulebooks will lead to more freedom and imagination in the non-combat portions of the game and not an elimination of them. *shrug*
There still are a hand full of non-combat skills, such as diplomacy and knowledge. But I think the general feeling is the "fluff rules" for non-combat weren't really needed. Do you really need rules to say how long it takes to make a non-magical weapon or how much money you could make playing an instrument in a medium sized village for a given skill roll? Or could you just work it out with the DM and agree on something reasonable for the type of campaign and setting you're in? The later option seems quicker (no need to look it up in a rulebook), less distracting for the other players and truer to the concept of role-playing. Resolving combat is where rules provide the most bang for the buck.
... comes out this weekend.
Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition comes out June 7th.
I love your comment! When I took my first ASM course, I also related it to BASIC. Memory offsets -> line numbers, jumps -> GOTOs, function calls (special case of jump) -> GOSUB, etc... Hooray BASIC!
As a programmer, *I* find it more readable as well. This doesn't matter when writing your own small program from scratch, but it's damn convenient when you've got to maintain someone else's code. You can do fewer "clever" things in Ada.
:= b; /= 0 THEN
Suppose we want to assign b to a, then execute c if b is non-zero:
In C:
if (a=b) c;
It is clever. But can easily be misread as a comparison between a and b instead of an assignment. Obviously (or maybe not) good programmers won't write this way, but C allows it and you don't always get to choose who wrote the code you're currently working with. And this is just a trivial example. It can get far more complex and clever than I'm willing to attempt.
Ada doesn't let you be that clever. You're forced to write it out:
a
IF b
c;
END IF;
Now pretend someone else wrote this and you don't know the original goal of the code segment. You're not even sure if the code is 100% correct or not. Which one would you rather maintain?
"Also, most low level issues are horribly badly documented (such as calling conventions), and there are no shift operators, meaning that your code will be littered with X / 2**Y (making the code more or less unreadable), there is also no way to properly do an arithmetic shift in Ada on a modular type."
Check out the "interfaces" package included with the language. It has all of these things (at least in Ada95).