I agree with the consensus here that anything can be addictive and it's ludicrous to legislate the concept of saving people from their own obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
With that being said, I do believe to some degree, in some games, the addictive nature is integrated into the design. It's less that the game itself is addictive as it is the methods to achieve desired goals become "job-like" in their requirements to force people to collaborate.
Everquest is a good example. The high end game requires that players work as a team and form guilds. The pressure comes when these guilds require their players to routinely show up and participate on a regular schedule. If you aren't consistently online, you risk being removed from the guild or being passed over. As a result, the game becomes less of an addiction and more of an obligation or burden. I find this to be more detrimental than the notion that the games are psychologically addictive.
I respect that there is this thriving "twitch-centric", Prozac-prone community of gamers who enjoy Halo, Half Life, Unreal, GTA and their contemporaries as appropriate entertainment therapy.
I've played these games; they're visually exciting in many cases but the environment is so aggressive and hostile that it seems to breed an almost artificially, unrealistic, hyperactive, reactive approach to problem-solving that many of us feel is highly counterproductive, if not destructive.
I don't see where it's fun to drop into an online sim and get instantly killed. Sure, if you're masochistic and determiend enough, you can rise above the neophyte level to end up the killER instead of the killED, but I have a hard time appreciating the resulting rewards.
I figure at some point, more "thinking peoples games" will rise up from the ashes of these sadistic, unrealistic twitch-fests, which will remind gamers of what it's really like playing a game, instead of merely playing a victim or a victimizer.
I'm using extract to make all global variables accessible from within a function in PHP. If you know a way of doing this without using extract() (and not having to keep track of what globals are defined), I'm all ears!
I have an application that requires a function to access globals as if it were not local. I wish there was some easy way to do that, but I have not found any.
Wow...you know nothing about Java, do you? I'd be willing to bet that you've never done any significant development in Java. As others have said, there's plenty of valid critiques of Java to be made, and you've made none of them.
I guess the level of my experience with Java would be dependent upon how you define "significant development". I've done quite a bit, but ultimately we abandoned the use of Java for large-scale, mission critical applications. Your mileage may vary... I understand some of you spent lots of good money and time in college to base your cirriculum around Java and it's painful to entertain the possibility you might as well have been studying Old English. Don't take it out on me.
The reason why there are different computer languages is because different languages have different specialities. The problem I have with Java is that it really IMO, doesn't have any specialty. PHP, Perl, Cobol, C, C++, etc., are languages that offer specific advantages in specific areas. Java was introduced as a corporate marketing tool more than a language designed to address a specific need in any specific field of technology. Most of the reasons Java sycophants cite for Java's usefulness could just as easily be implemented via add-on libraries to other languages such as C/C++, so I see no good reason to jump on the Java bandwagon.
You can mod my post a troll all you guys want. But it won't be my fault that Java is a dying language that will never have the longevity of its peers. Save room in your closet, next to the Amiga, for your Java manuals.
People hate java 'cause it's overly verbose, but complain that languages like perl look like line noise.
People hate Java because it's a language that was born of an advertising campaign and not a specific need in the technology field.
People hate Java because the technology has been caught in the middle of several commercial interests and platform wars, which has crippled the promise of Java's stability and reliability.
People hate Java because it's a lie. Java promised a new generation language that was to be cross-platform compatible, but it's actually less cross-platform compatible than C/C++.
People hate Java because it's slow as molasses. Need an example? Take a look at Puzzle Pirates, a very clever multiplayer online game, that because the developers were foolish enough to use Java, runs ten times slower than it should and is painful to use as a result.
People hate Java because it sucks. I'm sorry to those of you who are Java programmers and are finding less jobs, but no sane company wants to use this technology when there are other systems available that offer better performance, reliability and longevity.
When we upgraded to the latest version of PHP, which also required a Zend upgrade, several of our applications wouldn't work. I have reason to believe there's a serious bug in the Zend engine which has crippled some functionality of PHP. We're still waiting for a fix so we can upgrade to a more secure version of PHP.
what this American obsession with secrecy of "social security numbers" is?
In the US a SSN is the passkey to a lot of information. Even though by law a person is not required to cough up his SSN to corporations (this may have been nullified with the Patriot Act) most companies that have databases on people use the SSN as an index. This is especially true of the major credit companies, which use a person's SSN as the primary key. With a SSN, you can pull someone's credit report and get their whole life. In addition, the SSN is used as a key for many other services. Most utilities and credit companies use the last 4 digits of a person's SSN as a verification code. SSN is the basis for opening bank accounts, obtaining credit, filing taxes, etc.
The only way to get companies to take security seriously is to embarass them.
The only way to get companies to protect their consumers is to make it very dangerous economically for them to operate if the public is aware they have problems with security.
The only way to get government to crack down on criminals engaging in this activity is to get corporations very concerned about the economic implications of these breeches and therefore put (the most effective) pressure on government and law enforcement. If it were up to the average citizen to lobby government for improvement in this area, we'd be even worse off.
It sucks if you're the company being exposed, but it's better in the long run for everybody.
I think one key indicator that may wake people up will be the upcoming hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. The last two years were exceptionally bad. If for a third time, we have more major hurricanes, it's going to be hard for the mainstream with their heads buried in the sand to ignore, especially those in Texas, Florida and other red states on the Gulf.
You don't believe either. You pay homage to whoever the corporate-sponsored talking face on the television in your living room repeatedly tells you is "the most trusted name in news."
Actually, I think Napster might be taking into account the scenario you're talking of. They may end up depending upon the laziness of consumers to not cancel the service and thus disable some of the remaining songs thay might still listen to. Ultimately, I'd bet a lot of Napster subscribers end up paying ten times more for listening to the same music over and over and never owning it.
1. The profitability and viability of the entire Napster venture is dependent upon the security and integrity of Microsoft's DRM software. If you're going to pick one company in the world upon whose security practices will determine the future of your venture, and you pick Microsoft, you might as well cash out now.
You know you have a good product when someone spends 250+ hours to create an homage to it. I wonder if anyone ever has done something like that for Microsoft?
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said singles didn't exist in the past. I also never said there was no exploitation or over-produced music in the past either.
However, I don't have my head up my ass and am not an apologist for the obnoxious corporate media consolidation that is increasing at a rapid pace. And yes there were "music mafia" in the past, but the market was not sewn up like it is now. There IS a difference. An artist like Bob Dylan WOULD HAVE NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER OF GETTING AIRPLAY TODAY. If you disagree, it is you who is wearing rose-colored glasses.
First off, I think the methodology is flawed in thinking that people can be broken into two groups of "smart" or "not-so-smart" people. That's ridiculous. They might as well have called the groups for this experiment, "nervous" and "not-so-nervous" people because that's basically what they were. I am not sure where the "smart" aspect comes in. There are varying degrees of intelligence, and no doubt those that are truly smart could easily deal with a pressure situation, so what they ended up creating were two groups, neither of which were ultimately of truly "smart" people. I think there's a high degree of extrapolation in place when you claim that high memory volume equates to intelligence or resourcefulness in a means that most people consider "smart."
Ultimately, this goofy study seemed to confirm that "ignorance is bliss." Thank you Professor Obvious. I wonder how much taxpayer money went into that boondoggle?
I was thinking the same thing. It seems these days anyone at a university can run some pesudo-scientific simulation and get some press, regardless of whether or not their methods are credible.
I think a lot of this has to do with the ever-increasing media machine slowly giving everyone A.D.D. You can't watch television or listen to the radio without having your senses routinely assaulted. This makes it difficult to concentrate on any one thing, and as a result, the populace tends to get tired of products at a much faster pace, and has begun to expect instant replacements that are more exciting.
I think these things come and go in cycles. Right now we're in a depression when it comes to things like quality, social consciousness, creativity and the product forms that represent the latest advances in these areas. There are always exceptions, like the iPod which is compensating for the lack of good music by enabling new generations to discover older, better-crafted music. I see much of the new technology ending up exposing people to a more "golden age" of music/media where people subscribed to bands and albums instead of formulaic, over-produced singles.
Perhaps we'll see younger kids getting into more 60s music... that was about the last time an artist that could write an anti-war song and get any airplay. Maybe when corporate america sees the money they're losing by "playing it safe" with their "art" they might start giving interesting, inciteful artists a chance to share the spotlight with the current crop of plastic automatons.
From my experience, heat is indeed a killer, but more often than not, the heat and the subsequent damage done is a secondary effect of not keeping computer equipment in a clean environment. When dust accumulates in the PC, this affects the components and causes heat build-up. I'd say a bigger problem involves people not keeping the area around their PC clean. The way I figure, if you own a cat and the thing is always near the computer, subtract a year right off the bat.
Attach a dynamo to Gene Roddenberry's corpse and play the first few seasons of Enterprise at his gravesite. Sell the electricity generated from his spinning corpse to the power companies and it should be more than enough to finance several more seasons of the show.
I remember many years ago when I got a new phone installed in an apartment. I used to answer the phone with "Greetings" instead of "Hello". The phone company said that if I didn't answer the phone with "Hello", they would charge me the much higher business rate. Same service, but if they can find some angle to extort more money from you, they will.
Now we live in an age where merchandising is an art form that revolves around the science of using peoples' laziness against them economically. Products are advertised with "rebates" fooling consumers into thinking that the published price is what they're paying. For those that don't shop around, they lose.
What bothers me most about this scene is not the variation in prices... I can respect companies' having different pricing schemes based on the market. What I can't stand is the marketplace being mined with "fluff" products that really don't perform as advertised. This has become a really slippery slope for the consumer. Walk into a Blockbuster and you'll find tons of crappy movies you've never heard of among more popular movies -- they seed the shelves with cheap products. This is rampant in the software and electronics fields too... nowadays you have to do a lot of research not only to get a decent price, but to even make sure what you're buying doesn't turn out to be a complete fraud.
Just yesterday I was in Target, I looked in the software section and there was a $50 piece of software from Nero that purported to "COPY DVDs". Way down in fine print it said, "This product will copy all non-copy-protected DVDs" -- does the typical consumer know that this Nero product is essentially useless and won't allow him/her to back up their movies? I doubt it. Next to this software was another package much cheaper that also promised to copy DVDs and it makes no mention of being limited to non-copy-protected media. It's like walking in a mine field trying to even find out if any of this crap will even do what you expect it to do... never mind the price.
I believe one reason why most desktops don't seem to live up to the performance process each next generation promises has mostly to do with bad programming habits. Today's developers are using so many high-level development tools that have huge, multi-leveled layers of abstraction that applications become incredibly bloated. It's nothing short of obsene when, for example, you note that a utility application requires x GIGABYTES of disk space.
There seems to be no incentive these days to write small, efficient code... not when you can keep consumers on a constantly spinning hamster wheel of hardware upgrades to compensate for your bad software design.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the consensus here that anything can be addictive and it's ludicrous to legislate the concept of saving people from their own obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
With that being said, I do believe to some degree, in some games, the addictive nature is integrated into the design. It's less that the game itself is addictive as it is the methods to achieve desired goals become "job-like" in their requirements to force people to collaborate.
Everquest is a good example. The high end game requires that players work as a team and form guilds. The pressure comes when these guilds require their players to routinely show up and participate on a regular schedule. If you aren't consistently online, you risk being removed from the guild or being passed over. As a result, the game becomes less of an addiction and more of an obligation or burden. I find this to be more detrimental than the notion that the games are psychologically addictive.
all the large scale high priced developer jobs are for J2EE
See: basic rule of supply and demand.
I respect that there is this thriving "twitch-centric", Prozac-prone community of gamers who enjoy Halo, Half Life, Unreal, GTA and their contemporaries as appropriate entertainment therapy.
I've played these games; they're visually exciting in many cases but the environment is so aggressive and hostile that it seems to breed an almost artificially, unrealistic, hyperactive, reactive approach to problem-solving that many of us feel is highly counterproductive, if not destructive.
I don't see where it's fun to drop into an online sim and get instantly killed. Sure, if you're masochistic and determiend enough, you can rise above the neophyte level to end up the killER instead of the killED, but I have a hard time appreciating the resulting rewards.
I figure at some point, more "thinking peoples games" will rise up from the ashes of these sadistic, unrealistic twitch-fests, which will remind gamers of what it's really like playing a game, instead of merely playing a victim or a victimizer.
I'm using extract to make all global variables accessible from within a function in PHP. If you know a way of doing this without using extract() (and not having to keep track of what globals are defined), I'm all ears!
I have an application that requires a function to access globals as if it were not local. I wish there was some easy way to do that, but I have not found any.
Wow...you know nothing about Java, do you? I'd be willing to bet that you've never done any significant development in Java. As others have said, there's plenty of valid critiques of Java to be made, and you've made none of them.
I guess the level of my experience with Java would be dependent upon how you define "significant development". I've done quite a bit, but ultimately we abandoned the use of Java for large-scale, mission critical applications. Your mileage may vary... I understand some of you spent lots of good money and time in college to base your cirriculum around Java and it's painful to entertain the possibility you might as well have been studying Old English. Don't take it out on me.
The reason why there are different computer languages is because different languages have different specialities. The problem I have with Java is that it really IMO, doesn't have any specialty. PHP, Perl, Cobol, C, C++, etc., are languages that offer specific advantages in specific areas. Java was introduced as a corporate marketing tool more than a language designed to address a specific need in any specific field of technology. Most of the reasons Java sycophants cite for Java's usefulness could just as easily be implemented via add-on libraries to other languages such as C/C++, so I see no good reason to jump on the Java bandwagon.
You can mod my post a troll all you guys want. But it won't be my fault that Java is a dying language that will never have the longevity of its peers. Save room in your closet, next to the Amiga, for your Java manuals.
People hate java 'cause it's overly verbose, but complain that languages like perl look like line noise.
People hate Java because it's a language that was born of an advertising campaign and not a specific need in the technology field.
People hate Java because the technology has been caught in the middle of several commercial interests and platform wars, which has crippled the promise of Java's stability and reliability.
People hate Java because it's a lie. Java promised a new generation language that was to be cross-platform compatible, but it's actually less cross-platform compatible than C/C++.
People hate Java because it's slow as molasses. Need an example? Take a look at Puzzle Pirates, a very clever multiplayer online game, that because the developers were foolish enough to use Java, runs ten times slower than it should and is painful to use as a result.
People hate Java because it sucks. I'm sorry to those of you who are Java programmers and are finding less jobs, but no sane company wants to use this technology when there are other systems available that offer better performance, reliability and longevity.
When we upgraded to the latest version of PHP, which also required a Zend upgrade, several of our applications wouldn't work. I have reason to believe there's a serious bug in the Zend engine which has crippled some functionality of PHP. We're still waiting for a fix so we can upgrade to a more secure version of PHP.
He gave Network Solutions an award for Outstanding commercial Internet organization.
what this American obsession with secrecy of "social security numbers" is?
In the US a SSN is the passkey to a lot of information. Even though by law a person is not required to cough up his SSN to corporations (this may have been nullified with the Patriot Act) most companies that have databases on people use the SSN as an index. This is especially true of the major credit companies, which use a person's SSN as the primary key. With a SSN, you can pull someone's credit report and get their whole life. In addition, the SSN is used as a key for many other services. Most utilities and credit companies use the last 4 digits of a person's SSN as a verification code. SSN is the basis for opening bank accounts, obtaining credit, filing taxes, etc.
I'd rather this was publicized.
Unfortunately...
The only way to get companies to take security seriously is to embarass them.
The only way to get companies to protect their consumers is to make it very dangerous economically for them to operate if the public is aware they have problems with security.
The only way to get government to crack down on criminals engaging in this activity is to get corporations very concerned about the economic implications of these breeches and therefore put (the most effective) pressure on government and law enforcement. If it were up to the average citizen to lobby government for improvement in this area, we'd be even worse off.
It sucks if you're the company being exposed, but it's better in the long run for everybody.
I think one key indicator that may wake people up will be the upcoming hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico. The last two years were exceptionally bad. If for a third time, we have more major hurricanes, it's going to be hard for the mainstream with their heads buried in the sand to ignore, especially those in Texas, Florida and other red states on the Gulf.
You don't believe either. You pay homage to whoever the corporate-sponsored talking face on the television in your living room repeatedly tells you is "the most trusted name in news."
Actually, I think Napster might be taking into account the scenario you're talking of. They may end up depending upon the laziness of consumers to not cancel the service and thus disable some of the remaining songs thay might still listen to. Ultimately, I'd bet a lot of Napster subscribers end up paying ten times more for listening to the same music over and over and never owning it.
1. The profitability and viability of the entire Napster venture is dependent upon the security and integrity of Microsoft's DRM software. If you're going to pick one company in the world upon whose security practices will determine the future of your venture, and you pick Microsoft, you might as well cash out now.
Napster isn't being completely honest about their so-called all you can eat music policy.
You know you have a good product when someone spends 250+ hours to create an homage to it. I wonder if anyone ever has done something like that for Microsoft?
Don't put words in my mouth. I never said singles didn't exist in the past. I also never said there was no exploitation or over-produced music in the past either.
However, I don't have my head up my ass and am not an apologist for the obnoxious corporate media consolidation that is increasing at a rapid pace. And yes there were "music mafia" in the past, but the market was not sewn up like it is now. There IS a difference. An artist like Bob Dylan WOULD HAVE NO CHANCE WHATSOEVER OF GETTING AIRPLAY TODAY. If you disagree, it is you who is wearing rose-colored glasses.
First off, I think the methodology is flawed in thinking that people can be broken into two groups of "smart" or "not-so-smart" people. That's ridiculous. They might as well have called the groups for this experiment, "nervous" and "not-so-nervous" people because that's basically what they were. I am not sure where the "smart" aspect comes in. There are varying degrees of intelligence, and no doubt those that are truly smart could easily deal with a pressure situation, so what they ended up creating were two groups, neither of which were ultimately of truly "smart" people. I think there's a high degree of extrapolation in place when you claim that high memory volume equates to intelligence or resourcefulness in a means that most people consider "smart."
Ultimately, this goofy study seemed to confirm that "ignorance is bliss." Thank you Professor Obvious. I wonder how much taxpayer money went into that boondoggle?
I was thinking the same thing. It seems these days anyone at a university can run some pesudo-scientific simulation and get some press, regardless of whether or not their methods are credible.
I think a lot of this has to do with the ever-increasing media machine slowly giving everyone A.D.D. You can't watch television or listen to the radio without having your senses routinely assaulted. This makes it difficult to concentrate on any one thing, and as a result, the populace tends to get tired of products at a much faster pace, and has begun to expect instant replacements that are more exciting.
I think these things come and go in cycles. Right now we're in a depression when it comes to things like quality, social consciousness, creativity and the product forms that represent the latest advances in these areas. There are always exceptions, like the iPod which is compensating for the lack of good music by enabling new generations to discover older, better-crafted music. I see much of the new technology ending up exposing people to a more "golden age" of music/media where people subscribed to bands and albums instead of formulaic, over-produced singles.
Perhaps we'll see younger kids getting into more 60s music... that was about the last time an artist that could write an anti-war song and get any airplay. Maybe when corporate america sees the money they're losing by "playing it safe" with their "art" they might start giving interesting, inciteful artists a chance to share the spotlight with the current crop of plastic automatons.
From my experience, heat is indeed a killer, but more often than not, the heat and the subsequent damage done is a secondary effect of not keeping computer equipment in a clean environment. When dust accumulates in the PC, this affects the components and causes heat build-up. I'd say a bigger problem involves people not keeping the area around their PC clean. The way I figure, if you own a cat and the thing is always near the computer, subtract a year right off the bat.
Attach a dynamo to Gene Roddenberry's corpse and play the first few seasons of Enterprise at his gravesite. Sell the electricity generated from his spinning corpse to the power companies and it should be more than enough to finance several more seasons of the show.
"Why feel inadequate in one plane of existence when you can feel inadequate in two."
I remember many years ago when I got a new phone installed in an apartment. I used to answer the phone with "Greetings" instead of "Hello". The phone company said that if I didn't answer the phone with "Hello", they would charge me the much higher business rate. Same service, but if they can find some angle to extort more money from you, they will.
Now we live in an age where merchandising is an art form that revolves around the science of using peoples' laziness against them economically. Products are advertised with "rebates" fooling consumers into thinking that the published price is what they're paying. For those that don't shop around, they lose.
What bothers me most about this scene is not the variation in prices... I can respect companies' having different pricing schemes based on the market. What I can't stand is the marketplace being mined with "fluff" products that really don't perform as advertised. This has become a really slippery slope for the consumer. Walk into a Blockbuster and you'll find tons of crappy movies you've never heard of among more popular movies -- they seed the shelves with cheap products. This is rampant in the software and electronics fields too... nowadays you have to do a lot of research not only to get a decent price, but to even make sure what you're buying doesn't turn out to be a complete fraud.
Just yesterday I was in Target, I looked in the software section and there was a $50 piece of software from Nero that purported to "COPY DVDs". Way down in fine print it said, "This product will copy all non-copy-protected DVDs" -- does the typical consumer know that this Nero product is essentially useless and won't allow him/her to back up their movies? I doubt it. Next to this software was another package much cheaper that also promised to copy DVDs and it makes no mention of being limited to non-copy-protected media. It's like walking in a mine field trying to even find out if any of this crap will even do what you expect it to do... never mind the price.
I believe one reason why most desktops don't seem to live up to the performance process each next generation promises has mostly to do with bad programming habits. Today's developers are using so many high-level development tools that have huge, multi-leveled layers of abstraction that applications become incredibly bloated. It's nothing short of obsene when, for example, you note that a utility application requires x GIGABYTES of disk space.
There seems to be no incentive these days to write small, efficient code... not when you can keep consumers on a constantly spinning hamster wheel of hardware upgrades to compensate for your bad software design.