The point that a total rewrite loses all the little tweaks over time is well taken.
However, it also loses all the little hacks to make things work, particularly ones from bad design due to not fully understanding the problem the first time around.
Most code for anything substantial has at least one major design flaw the first time around that's often possible to work around, but extremely difficult to fix. A major rewrite to a more appropriate solution (like better data structures) can often simplify code substantially and reduce hard to find bugs.
But if that's not the case, resist. There's sometimes the urge to rewrite something because it's old, or difficult to understand. Unless your solution is much easier to work with or solves some actual problem, it's very risky.
I think this is a difference between MMORPGs and other kinds of games.
For most games, you buy it, play it, expect a few patches, and that's the extent of your interaction with the developers for most people.
For MMORPGs, the relationship is vastly different. There's a continuous active dialogue between the developers and the players. Changes are expected - in the Asheron's Call case, in the form of a monthly patch, some of which have a level of content that would be expected of an expansion pack. (And certainly, the collective patches over a six month time do.) Game balance is changed, often dramatically. This feedback cycle is at the core of the current MMORPG culture, and is a striking difference from classic gamer/developer interaction.
Just about every MMORPG player I've ever talked to has strong opinions about Turbine, Verant, Funcom, whatever developer company they've played the games from. Usually not very positive opinions, too.
Even gaming companies that I've strongly enjoyed their products (Blizzard, Black Isle, Interplay, what have you) I have a different kind of relationship with. Sure, I'll pay attention to what they release, and probably am more likely to buy. But I don't know the names of the developers at these companies. I haven't read many chats with them. Yes, there are people who do, but they're the exception, the 1% of the player base. In MMORPGs, that number is closer to 40%, and most of the serious players.
(Okay, I made up those numbers. But I'm pretty confident that it's small number vs. big number.)
Mind you, I'm not sure at all that the relationship between MMORPG companies and their fans is a healthy one - in fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't - but it exists and is a different animal than we've seen a lot of before.
>Funny, I thought that there were just as many on the right (especially the religious right) who are interested in censoring things.
This is clearly true - extremists on both sides are censors, for different reasons but to the same ends.
Not convinced that it's not the other side of the spectrum from you? I present data:
In a list produced to mark the American Library Association's annual Banned Books week, 2002's most frequently challenged books were, with their alleged 'offence:
The Harry Potter series, by JK Rowling - glorifying magic and wizardry.
The Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, - sexual content and unsuitability to its targeted age group.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier - offensive language and unsuitability to age group.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, - sexual content, racism, violence and unsuitability to age group.
Taming the Star Runner by S.E Hinton, - offensive language.
Captain Underpants, by Dav Pilkey, - encouraging children to disobey authority.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain - racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson - offensive language.
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, by Mildred D Taylor - insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
Julie of Wolves, by Jean Craighead George - sexual content, offensive language and violence.
Harry Potter is clearly a right-wing protest, as well as most of the sex and bad word complaints. Huck Finn is clearly a left-wing protest, as well as most of the insensitivity and racism complaints.
This problem doesn't come from the classic American political spectrum. It's more on an individual rights vs. community standards axis. The techie crowd skews strongly towards individual rights, but it seems like the general popluation in most countries is more towards community standards.
(Personally, I'm not a big fan of censorship, either for these games or these books, but anyone blaming the Left or the Right is just not paying any attention.)
Well, your math skills aren't l33t, but the idea is sound.
The typical hour-long show is 42 minutes without commercials. So, that's 18 minutes of commercials per episode.
An average season is 23 episodes (give or take a few).
So, 18 x 23 = 414 minutes. Or 6.9 (say 7) hours.
If you value your time at $40/hour (very cheap!), that's $280, much less than the cost of a DVD set.
Or, spend $20/month for a Netflix subscription - they're adding a lot of tv shows to the list. Given the higher cost of these kinds of set (like DS9), depending on how fast you watch them, this might be a financial win.
I agree that watching them on TV without Tivo is a waste of a lot of time, which is for some people money. (I actually would probably be wasting evening time with commercials, so it translates more to extra sleep for me, but that's even better.)
I got a beta CD (quite a long time ago) and loaded this sucker up. The first thing I noticed was the terrible graphics - only somewhat better than Bards Tale era. This isn't necessarily the kiss of death.
But the game was just so generic. It was just another fantasy game in a crowded market, with the only interesting thing about it being that it was massively multiplayer.
I vaguely recall spending about an hour playing with it, before concluding that it was terrible, and not comparable to Asheron's Call or Everquest or Ultima Online. And when you're talking about games with a monthly fee, not to mention a sizeable time commitment, MMORPGs compete head-to-head more than traditional games do for players. There's very little reason to have chosen this one. It wasn't a hidden gem, just hidden.
With respect to pro athletes, keep in mind that it's not a matter of greedy jocks taking the public for money, in reality.
It's massive multi-billionaires (like pre-AOL Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch, and Walmart's Carl Pohlad) setting prices based on what the market can bear. That's 90%+ of what determines ticket price - salary concerns are a red herring.
And most of the owners are making large, large amounts of money - much more than even the highest paid players. The accounting practices are such that it's extremely hard to get actual data, as things like concessions are often booked under a sub-corporation and not reported as income on what little data they do release (which always shows them losing money.)
Player salaries are supply/demand, and their skills are not easily replacable. They're high in sports without a salary cap, because the marginal wins that player is expected to provide is worth a real dollar amount in increased ticket sales and merchandise. Some teams spend their money more wisely than others, but they're hardly offering contracts at gunpoint.
Leagues with a salary cap, like the NFL, the owners are raking in money hand-over-fist.
Sure, washed up athletes in guaranteed contracts are a huge waste of money. Why do owners give out multi-year deals? One, cost-certainty - if I sign a young player for a long contract, and he breaks out into an MVP, I have him for those years at below market value, a competitive advantage. Two, because the players want it, and if I don't offer them, they'll sign with someone else who will. Eventually, every athelete stops being productive, for one reason or another, and if you don't do your analysis correctly or just get plain unlucky, well, that's the chance you take.
Many contracts do include substantial amounts in performance-based incentives (particularly for often injured players.) The entire industry could, I suppose, switch to entirely performance-based after the fact salaries - but both sides would fight tooth and nail to stop it. The players want some protection, so that if they get hurt and miss the year they don't have to forclose on their mortgage. The owners need the cost-certainty - if the Oakland A's had to pay for what the players actually produced, rather than being able to bargain hunt and find value in unexpected places, the franchise would collapse. (Of course, it'd be awfully nice for the Orioles.)
That's probably far more sports economics than Slashdot readers typically want, but I strongly suspect that the same sort of naive, spiteful logic applies to the rest of the list. (Though, I do see the point about CEOs of failing companies taking multi-million dollar severance packages.)
>Granted, word of mouth is more important than reviews, but that doesn't make reviews useless.
What is word of mouth, other than amateur reviews? If your friends tastes are similar to yours, then they're probably more useful. I tend to find that my tastes run closer to certain film critics than my friends (I need new friends, I guess!) and that tends to influence what I see (or add to my netflix queue) a lot more.
But the trick is to know how to be a smart consumer. Understand what you like about movies, and what flaws don't bother you. I really don't like bloody graphic violence, so obviously am giving Kill Bill a pass, based on what the positive reviews were saying. I don't mind movies that focus on character development, so ended up liking Ang Lee's Hulk - and the negative reviews didn't disuade me, as I clearly like the kind of thing many find tedious.
Find some good reviewers (that say _why_ they liked it in clear terms), and decide if you tend to like those elements, and you end up seeing a lot fewer movies you don't enjoy.
(I suppose someone whose tastes ran very close to that of a Hollywood Producer might not have to be so discriminating. But, I'm definitely not that person.)
(And yes, Rotten Tomatos is a wonderful site.)
I've got a Tivo pass to Ebert & Roeper, and it's caused me to catch some wonderful films that I might have otherwise missed, like Whale Rider, and to steer clear of some things that had good marketing departments, like Dreamcatcher.
Well, if you want a truly evil RPG, you could always read the review of FATAL.
(Warning: this review, and certainly this game, is not work-safe. Or good for your faith in humanity. The game is a pretty tough thing to overcome for a zero-censorship stance - I think I'd rather see kids reading Mein Kampf. Seriously. But the review is damn funny, of a really unpleasant game.)
>The author encourages the reader to use a computer to enter, run and debug the book's programming examples. I concur with this advice, though it isn't absolutely necessary.
This is something that novice programmers are well advised to listen to. I constantly am asked by junior programmers 'What happens when I do x', where x is something simple, like try to print out an array.
Half the time, the problem can be answered by simply trying it. And the other half of the time, you end up with a better question (I want to print out the values of an array, but print @array didn't work. What's the trick?) (In perl, see 'perldoc -f join'. That's not my point, but I don't want to leave you hanging!)
And even better, learning the value of experimentation makes you a better programmer, and a much more pleasant junior employee. Instead of spending all your time asking a series of questions, you try a whole bunch of things. By actually stopping to think about the problem, which this approach forces you to do, you end up learning a lot more, and sometimes the failed efforts are exactly what you need later. And if you're stumped, you still end up looking smarter, because you at least tried some approaches. And more often than not, it's easier to learn the answer if you've taken the time to struggle with and really learn the problem you're trying to solve, and remember the answer next time.
I think this is one of the unheralded keys to becoming a good professional programmer.
Caveat: This works a lot better in some development environments than others. I do most of my work in perl, which is ideally suited to this rapid prototype approach. In environments with long compile times, it's more tedious. This is thankfully decreasingly true, with faster machines making the hours-long compiles a historical problem, so take advantage of it, learn to experiment, and reap the rewards.
Anyone with any sense should probably look at it as an entry on the resume equivalent to a fairly advanced research job. If it's relevant research to the position, great! If not, well, depends on the rest of the resume. You at least know this person can get large amounts of technical writing done, can work at projects that are (probably) cutting edge, and has some degree of ability to get things done. Much the same as you'd learn if they held a job to do the project that was their thesis.
The catch is when money is introduced. Some people with PhDs demand more money for it; some hiring managers are afraid to make offers to a PhD that they'd make to a Masters or less degree, and decide to make no offer at all. I think both of these positions are stupid - a PhD is just a different kind of experience, and doesn't make you intrinsically better, any more than any other degree does. If your experience, including college, and your knowledge, matches you to a job, you should be hired and paid what a job with those requirements is worth, no matter if those requirements came from the halls of Harvard or Hewlett Packard.
Keep in mind, it's not like Axciom has, say, only a million potential targets in their database. It's much, much larger than that. They have some data on virtually every adult in the U.S., and I have no idea what their international market is like.
And while they have contact information for all those people (directory assistance is part of their business model), it would be Very Expensive to send out a letter to all of them. Millions of dollars. Without a court order to do so, I'd be surprised if any company would do this.
And it's not like there's some action that a consumer should take. What would the letter say: "Please be aware that the company that handles the address verification system for one or more of your credit cards has been a victim of data theft by an employee. We do not know for sure which records were compromised, so please be sure to watch your credit card bills closely for fraudulent charges." Anyone who doesn't _already_ watch their bills for fraudulent charges is pretty terminally stupid, and it's already pretty easy (if sometimes a hassle) to get a refund on such things as a customer.
So, the company ops not to do something that would be tremendously expensive and do very little good. Welcome to reality.
There's not a lot of debate that the comic in question (which was a Manga based off of Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend), a "classic" tentacle-porn thing) is reasonably classified as pornography. It's obscene, right along with your Playboys and whatnot. It's perfectly reasonable, under generally accepted U.S. law and custom, that it would be illegal to sell this material to children.
That's not the point.
The point is that the clerk (not the store owner or the creator, the sales clerk) is getting a criminal record (on probation and a hefty fine) for selling porn that was in a restricted adults-only section to an adult. Thankfully, the CBLDF has raised enough money to pay his fine - comic store clerks are not exactly on the fast track to fortune.
The prosecution actually used the argument that Comic Books were by definition for kids, and anyone selling Adult Comics was therefore selling Porn For Kids. And they won with that case!
It's going to be a _lot_ harder for adults in Texas to buy drawn porn. Not kids - there was no allegation in this case of selling porn to kids - adults. I don't care if comic porn is your thing or not - this is not rational.
And it's not just an 'Only In Texas' thing. How many states have groups pressuring law enforcement to engage in censorship? 50. And not just the U.S., though we're more culturally hung up on sex than many Western nations. It's not at all uncommon for comics to be held up at customs in many countries for a variety of reasons, usually involving sex and violence.
Debating about the first amendment and what is obscene and such is probably pretty valuable, but the issues in this particular case are _much_ simpler, and it's a tragic miscarriage of justice.
Yes, Sierra was working on the title - one of my gaming buddies was a developer on this game. It got cancelled several months after they moved all the programmers from Northern California to Seattle.
As it turns out, a former gaming buddy of mine now works at Turbine in Boston, and is working on this project (in a sysadmin capacity.) Small world! Though, these two friends of mine have never met.
There's no connection whatsoever between the two projects. The only thing that changed hands was the license, no code or design work.
(The former Middle Earth developer is now working on Pirates of the Burning Sea, a pirate MMORPG. Which looks cool, in this early stage of development, and I won't say more.)
I think I'd agree, given that the endpoint is probably not another edition of Perl 6 Essentials, but Programming Perl 4th Edition.
Reasons I think this: * Parrot Progress. The Parrot team clearly believes Parrot will be in good shape by next summer, to the sum that they've wagered that Python will run faster on Parrot than it does under it's current implementation by next OSCon, or the Python team gets to hit them with cream pies. I'm willing to accept that level of confidence to imply that Parrot will be up to the task of being usable to develop things onto by next year, and quite polished by 2005.
* Ponie (ie, Perl On New Interpreter Engine, ie perl5 on parrot): Someone (and my brain is fuzzy from being sick recently, sorry) is paying two competent developers to work half-time on Ponie for the next two years. Now, timeframes are often very hard to predict going into a project, but the goal is clear: Ponie for OSCon 2005.
So, with those critical building blocks in place, and judging by the fact that most of the hard design work is done (and looks very nice), it's just a simple matter of programming. (That's a joke.) I don't expect Perl6 to beat Ponie out the gate, but there's so much potential synergy between the projects, I boldly predict Larry Wall announcing Perl6 available in a stable version for OSCon 2006.
There's clearly a lot of speculation in this line of thought, and it's not like anyone really knows the answers. I like to think it's at least informed speculation, though. And I'd like nothing better than for it to be done sooner. I'd almost recommend people to _not_ check out this book - the design is so good, I've already come up with at least a dozen places in my code where I've wanted to use a perl6 feature that doesn't exist in perl5.
There's lots of ways to help - coding, design, doc writing, testing - as well as the more indirect method of donations to The Perl Foundation. Which ends up helping some of the key developers (like Larry Wall) work on Perl and still pay his bills and keep his health up.
We're attempting to convince our company to make a donation to the Perl Foundation, given how much we use it for our business. I heartily encourage similar efforts - $500 isn't much for a company, but it can add up quickly.
I was just at the LightningCD Launch Party last weekend, they might be exactly what you want.
Their business model is to use the customer's CD Burners, and they have software to manage the download, burning, and printing of liner notes and such for music that is bought online. I think the client is only for Windows at this point.
Their big focus is to have artist-friendly contracts. They pay 50% or more of revenue to the artist, for every sale, on time.
I'm friends with the founder, so obviously biased, and this is clearly a (relevant) ad, but I do hope they succeed, and can vouch that the people behind this company are real and full of integrity.
And, where else can you buy CDs by John Tynes (author of RPGs Delta Green and Unknown Armies) and the indescribable Old Man Tasty and the Lords of the Future?
Not that people are reading this thread much anymore, but to be fair, I got the game on Sunday, and managed to play it most of the day with no crashing or noticable bugs. Only real complaint was that the server I'd planned to play on was already full by then. Playing with friends has to come in the top three reasons, if not number one, as to what people want to do with these games, so that's a pretty big downer.
But, all things considered, a pretty quick recovery from the initial problems. Nobody will much care about a launch like this in 3 months time. More or less a non-event. Welcome to Slashdot As Usual.
So far, I'm finding combat rather uninteresting, but having a blast with crafting and entertaining, much to my surprise. Not sure if it'll stay fresh after months of doing it, but for now, I'm a happy dancing fool.
Doesn't this imply that the solution, from the Advertiser's perspective, is more frequent, shorter ad breaks?
I have to admit that I'm much more likely to sit through 1 or 2 30 second spots.
I'm not saying I _like_ this idea - it'd make me love my TiVo even more - but it is the logical conclusion to draw if your goal is to have people watch the ads instead of leaving the room.
(I do end up watching ads sometimes, even as a TiVo user. I still watch some things live. Sporting events and first-run shows that I happen to be free when they're on, notably. Yeah, I could wait 20 minutes or so and start the show later to skip the ads, but I usually don't.)
That may be true on I-5 (but doesn't it get quite congested daily), but it's much less true on 520/I-90, and 405.
Going across the bridges is always a bottleneck. These are two and three lane highways, largely geographically bound so that they're difficult to widen, that see a lot of traffic. At the wrong times of day, being able to use the HOV lanes saves a lot of time.
Say what you will about encouraging carpooling - it's clearly a good thing. But it's not practical for everyone, particularly someone whose job routinely requires them to stay extra hours unpredictably. (Like, say, a sysadmin.) What happens when your carpool buddy gets off work, but your server is down? And if you need to move equipment or other heavy things, you don't have a lot of options. It's not a Personal Failing of the driver that they can't make a carpool work for them, necessarily. Historically, the price of this has been to deal with traffic, or take the bus.
That said, I do live in Bellevue and bus in to Downtown Seattle every day. It's not that bad. I get a chance to read and listen to my iPod, and if the traffic is awful, I hardly notice. And it's environmentally sound, too. The number of Scary People on the busses in Seattle is relatively small (especially on the Eastside busses.) A little patience is required, but waiting for a bus is, IMO, preferable to waiting in traffic, so that's a win too.
Ultimately, it's the cost of parking downtown that drives me to use the bus, though.
The fine folks at Baseball Prospectus, the top web site for baseball analysis, asked the question: given that QuestTec is installed at some parks and not others, how is it affecting how the umpires call the game?
Really, most _Americans_ are appalled by the GTA series, once you get outside gamer circles. And even moreso if they've actually _seen_ the game being played. I mean, this is a game where you pull drivers out of cars, beat them to death, and run over pedestrians while trying to avoid the cops.
It doesn't exactly take a puritan to find that disturbing.
(I have played the game, and found it not to my taste. I don't mind that it exists, and hey, if that's what the market likes, so be it, but this is a far stronger case that the game has objectionable content than the typical anti-3D-shooter sentiment.)
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
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Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 1
If the argument is that we should be hiring programmers under 10, sure, this is a totally valid point.
However, 18 vs. 28 vs. 38, the effect is vastly smaller. And, IMO, more than offset by experience being able to filter out which things to learn and which are mistakes already made. Really, a mix in personalities is good between those that rapidly embrace new ideas, and those that reign in obvious mistakes. (We'll give away our product for free on our web page, how can we lose!)
Then again, maybe the solution really is to fill our dev positions with 8 year olds. Step 3, profit!
Oops. It was 4th when I was growing up. But the city council has had severe anti-growth policies for years (they rejected a Toys-R-Us in town because they didn't want 'that kind of business'), so I'm not surprised to see it falling on the list.
I recall it being about 40,000 circa 1990.
Still, the list is very Portland Metro Area heavy. For some purposes, Gresham, Beaverton, and Hillsboro are Greater Portland (and Springfield is Eugene), so if you count like that...
wait, a minute, what am I doing? I'm arguing a semantic point that's not at all relevant to my point. Argh, I must be on slashdot.
If it's just a straight mileage tax, it's pretty dumb. It's just like the gas tax, but as the article points out, without the incentives to have a fuel efficient car.
To make any sense at all, they'll have to acknowledge that Portland Transportation is VASTLY different than the rest of the state, particularly outside the Willamette Valley. Portland is a city, and has public transportation (not a great system, but it's at least there.) People have alternatives. And it's got a complex city road system.
The rest of the state is mostly rural, with long highway stretches that aren't nearly as expensive to maintain. There aren't bus alternatives most places. Driving 10 miles a day in Baker City is incomparable to driving 10 miles a day in Portland, in terms of impact on the roads.
They allude in the article of having the ability to tell where you are, so charge more for being part of the downtown rush hour vs. on a logging road that sees 10 cars per day. If they use it, they can possibly have the semblance of a fair system. If not, it's business as usual, where the rest of the state pays for things that mostly benefit Portland.
(I grew up in Corvallis. There's real traffic during home OSU games, for the 4th of July fireworks, and when the Jehovah's Witness convention is in town. That's it. And that's the 4th largest city in the State.)
Oregon's in such a financial free-fall right now, though, that anyone that can come through with a way to generate revenue, quickly, will get seriously listened to. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see a badly written new tax fly through without being scrutinzed.
Slashdot Mirror
The point that a total rewrite loses all the little tweaks over time is well taken.
However, it also loses all the little hacks to make things work, particularly ones from bad design due to not fully understanding the problem the first time around.
Most code for anything substantial has at least one major design flaw the first time around that's often possible to work around, but extremely difficult to fix. A major rewrite to a more appropriate solution (like better data structures) can often simplify code substantially and reduce hard to find bugs.
But if that's not the case, resist. There's sometimes the urge to rewrite something because it's old, or difficult to understand. Unless your solution is much easier to work with or solves some actual problem, it's very risky.
I think this is a difference between MMORPGs and other kinds of games.
For most games, you buy it, play it, expect a few patches, and that's the extent of your interaction with the developers for most people.
For MMORPGs, the relationship is vastly different. There's a continuous active dialogue between the developers and the players. Changes are expected - in the Asheron's Call case, in the form of a monthly patch, some of which have a level of content that would be expected of an expansion pack. (And certainly, the collective patches over a six month time do.) Game balance is changed, often dramatically. This feedback cycle is at the core of the current MMORPG culture, and is a striking difference from classic gamer/developer interaction.
Just about every MMORPG player I've ever talked to has strong opinions about Turbine, Verant, Funcom, whatever developer company they've played the games from. Usually not very positive opinions, too.
Even gaming companies that I've strongly enjoyed their products (Blizzard, Black Isle, Interplay, what have you) I have a different kind of relationship with. Sure, I'll pay attention to what they release, and probably am more likely to buy. But I don't know the names of the developers at these companies. I haven't read many chats with them. Yes, there are people who do, but they're the exception, the 1% of the player base. In MMORPGs, that number is closer to 40%, and most of the serious players.
(Okay, I made up those numbers. But I'm pretty confident that it's small number vs. big number.)
Mind you, I'm not sure at all that the relationship between MMORPG companies and their fans is a healthy one - in fact, I'm pretty sure it isn't - but it exists and is a different animal than we've seen a lot of before.
>Funny, I thought that there were just as many on the right (especially the religious right) who are interested in censoring things.
This is clearly true - extremists on both sides are censors, for different reasons but to the same ends.
Not convinced that it's not the other side of the spectrum from you? I present data:
In a list produced to mark the American Library Association's annual Banned Books week, 2002's most frequently challenged books were, with their alleged 'offence:
The Harry Potter series, by JK Rowling - glorifying magic and wizardry.
The Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, - sexual content and unsuitability to its targeted age group.
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier - offensive language and unsuitability to age group.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, - sexual content, racism, violence and unsuitability to age group.
Taming the Star Runner by S.E Hinton, - offensive language.
Captain Underpants, by Dav Pilkey, - encouraging children to disobey authority.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain - racism, insensitivity and offensive language.
Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson - offensive language.
Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry, by Mildred D Taylor - insensitivity, racism and offensive language.
Julie of Wolves, by Jean Craighead George - sexual content, offensive language and violence.
Harry Potter is clearly a right-wing protest, as well as most of the sex and bad word complaints. Huck Finn is clearly a left-wing protest, as well as most of the insensitivity and racism complaints.
This problem doesn't come from the classic American political spectrum. It's more on an individual rights vs. community standards axis. The techie crowd skews strongly towards individual rights, but it seems like the general popluation in most countries is more towards community standards.
(Personally, I'm not a big fan of censorship, either for these games or these books, but anyone blaming the Left or the Right is just not paying any attention.)
Well, your math skills aren't l33t, but the idea is sound.
The typical hour-long show is 42 minutes without commercials. So, that's 18 minutes of commercials per episode.
An average season is 23 episodes (give or take a few).
So, 18 x 23 = 414 minutes. Or 6.9 (say 7) hours.
If you value your time at $40/hour (very cheap!), that's $280, much less than the cost of a DVD set.
Or, spend $20/month for a Netflix subscription - they're adding a lot of tv shows to the list. Given the higher cost of these kinds of set (like DS9), depending on how fast you watch them, this might be a financial win.
I agree that watching them on TV without Tivo is a waste of a lot of time, which is for some people money. (I actually would probably be wasting evening time with commercials, so it translates more to extra sleep for me, but that's even better.)
I got a beta CD (quite a long time ago) and loaded this sucker up. The first thing I noticed was the terrible graphics - only somewhat better than Bards Tale era. This isn't necessarily the kiss of death.
But the game was just so generic. It was just another fantasy game in a crowded market, with the only interesting thing about it being that it was massively multiplayer.
I vaguely recall spending about an hour playing with it, before concluding that it was terrible, and not comparable to Asheron's Call or Everquest or Ultima Online. And when you're talking about games with a monthly fee, not to mention a sizeable time commitment, MMORPGs compete head-to-head more than traditional games do for players. There's very little reason to have chosen this one. It wasn't a hidden gem, just hidden.
With respect to pro athletes, keep in mind that it's not a matter of greedy jocks taking the public for money, in reality.
It's massive multi-billionaires (like pre-AOL Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch, and Walmart's Carl Pohlad) setting prices based on what the market can bear. That's 90%+ of what determines ticket price - salary concerns are a red herring.
And most of the owners are making large, large amounts of money - much more than even the highest paid players. The accounting practices are such that it's extremely hard to get actual data, as things like concessions are often booked under a sub-corporation and not reported as income on what little data they do release (which always shows them losing money.)
Player salaries are supply/demand, and their skills are not easily replacable. They're high in sports without a salary cap, because the marginal wins that player is expected to provide is worth a real dollar amount in increased ticket sales and merchandise. Some teams spend their money more wisely than others, but they're hardly offering contracts at gunpoint.
Leagues with a salary cap, like the NFL, the owners are raking in money hand-over-fist.
Sure, washed up athletes in guaranteed contracts are a huge waste of money. Why do owners give out multi-year deals? One, cost-certainty - if I sign a young player for a long contract, and he breaks out into an MVP, I have him for those years at below market value, a competitive advantage. Two, because the players want it, and if I don't offer them, they'll sign with someone else who will. Eventually, every athelete stops being productive, for one reason or another, and if you don't do your analysis correctly or just get plain unlucky, well, that's the chance you take.
Many contracts do include substantial amounts in performance-based incentives (particularly for often injured players.) The entire industry could, I suppose, switch to entirely performance-based after the fact salaries - but both sides would fight tooth and nail to stop it. The players want some protection, so that if they get hurt and miss the year they don't have to forclose on their mortgage. The owners need the cost-certainty - if the Oakland A's had to pay for what the players actually produced, rather than being able to bargain hunt and find value in unexpected places, the franchise would collapse. (Of course, it'd be awfully nice for the Orioles.)
That's probably far more sports economics than Slashdot readers typically want, but I strongly suspect that the same sort of naive, spiteful logic applies to the rest of the list. (Though, I do see the point about CEOs of failing companies taking multi-million dollar severance packages.)
>Granted, word of mouth is more important than reviews, but that doesn't make reviews useless.
What is word of mouth, other than amateur reviews? If your friends tastes are similar to yours, then they're probably more useful. I tend to find that my tastes run closer to certain film critics than my friends (I need new friends, I guess!) and that tends to influence what I see (or add to my netflix queue) a lot more.
But the trick is to know how to be a smart consumer. Understand what you like about movies, and what flaws don't bother you. I really don't like bloody graphic violence, so obviously am giving Kill Bill a pass, based on what the positive reviews were saying. I don't mind movies that focus on character development, so ended up liking Ang Lee's Hulk - and the negative reviews didn't disuade me, as I clearly like the kind of thing many find tedious.
Find some good reviewers (that say _why_ they liked it in clear terms), and decide if you tend to like those elements, and you end up seeing a lot fewer movies you don't enjoy.
(I suppose someone whose tastes ran very close to that of a Hollywood Producer might not have to be so discriminating. But, I'm definitely not that person.)
(And yes, Rotten Tomatos is a wonderful site.)
I've got a Tivo pass to Ebert & Roeper, and it's caused me to catch some wonderful films that I might have otherwise missed, like Whale Rider, and to steer clear of some things that had good marketing departments, like Dreamcatcher.
Well, if you want a truly evil RPG, you could always read the review of FATAL.
(Warning: this review, and certainly this game, is not work-safe. Or good for your faith in humanity. The game is a pretty tough thing to overcome for a zero-censorship stance - I think I'd rather see kids reading Mein Kampf. Seriously. But the review is damn funny, of a really unpleasant game.)
>The author encourages the reader to use a computer to enter, run and debug the book's programming examples. I concur with this advice, though it isn't absolutely necessary.
This is something that novice programmers are well advised to listen to. I constantly am asked by junior programmers 'What happens when I do x', where x is something simple, like try to print out an array.
Half the time, the problem can be answered by simply trying it. And the other half of the time, you end up with a better question (I want to print out the values of an array, but print @array didn't work. What's the trick?) (In perl, see 'perldoc -f join'. That's not my point, but I don't want to leave you hanging!)
And even better, learning the value of experimentation makes you a better programmer, and a much more pleasant junior employee. Instead of spending all your time asking a series of questions, you try a whole bunch of things. By actually stopping to think about the problem, which this approach forces you to do, you end up learning a lot more, and sometimes the failed efforts are exactly what you need later. And if you're stumped, you still end up looking smarter, because you at least tried some approaches. And more often than not, it's easier to learn the answer if you've taken the time to struggle with and really learn the problem you're trying to solve, and remember the answer next time.
I think this is one of the unheralded keys to becoming a good professional programmer.
Caveat: This works a lot better in some development environments than others. I do most of my work in perl, which is ideally suited to this rapid prototype approach. In environments with long compile times, it's more tedious. This is thankfully decreasingly true, with faster machines making the hours-long compiles a historical problem, so take advantage of it, learn to experiment, and reap the rewards.
You say that now, but we'll see who survives, when the ghosts finally attack!
Anyone with any sense should probably look at it as an entry on the resume equivalent to a fairly advanced research job. If it's relevant research to the position, great! If not, well, depends on the rest of the resume. You at least know this person can get large amounts of technical writing done, can work at projects that are (probably) cutting edge, and has some degree of ability to get things done. Much the same as you'd learn if they held a job to do the project that was their thesis.
The catch is when money is introduced. Some people with PhDs demand more money for it; some hiring managers are afraid to make offers to a PhD that they'd make to a Masters or less degree, and decide to make no offer at all. I think both of these positions are stupid - a PhD is just a different kind of experience, and doesn't make you intrinsically better, any more than any other degree does. If your experience, including college, and your knowledge, matches you to a job, you should be hired and paid what a job with those requirements is worth, no matter if those requirements came from the halls of Harvard or Hewlett Packard.
Keep in mind, it's not like Axciom has, say, only a million potential targets in their database. It's much, much larger than that. They have some data on virtually every adult in the U.S., and I have no idea what their international market is like.
And while they have contact information for all those people (directory assistance is part of their business model), it would be Very Expensive to send out a letter to all of them. Millions of dollars. Without a court order to do so, I'd be surprised if any company would do this.
And it's not like there's some action that a consumer should take. What would the letter say:
"Please be aware that the company that handles the address verification system for one or more of your credit cards has been a victim of data theft by an employee. We do not know for sure which records were compromised, so please be sure to watch your credit card bills closely for fraudulent charges." Anyone who doesn't _already_ watch their bills for fraudulent charges is pretty terminally stupid, and it's already pretty easy (if sometimes a hassle) to get a refund on such things as a customer.
So, the company ops not to do something that would be tremendously expensive and do very little good. Welcome to reality.
There's not a lot of debate that the comic in question (which was a Manga based off of Urotsukidoji (Legend of the Overfiend), a "classic" tentacle-porn thing) is reasonably classified as pornography. It's obscene, right along with your Playboys and whatnot. It's perfectly reasonable, under generally accepted U.S. law and custom, that it would be illegal to sell this material to children.
That's not the point.
The point is that the clerk (not the store owner or the creator, the sales clerk) is getting a criminal record (on probation and a hefty fine) for selling porn that was in a restricted adults-only section to an adult. Thankfully, the CBLDF has raised enough money to pay his fine - comic store clerks are not exactly on the fast track to fortune.
The prosecution actually used the argument that Comic Books were by definition for kids, and anyone selling Adult Comics was therefore selling Porn For Kids. And they won with that case!
It's going to be a _lot_ harder for adults in Texas to buy drawn porn. Not kids - there was no allegation in this case of selling porn to kids - adults. I don't care if comic porn is your thing or not - this is not rational.
And it's not just an 'Only In Texas' thing. How many states have groups pressuring law enforcement to engage in censorship? 50. And not just the U.S., though we're more culturally hung up on sex than many Western nations. It's not at all uncommon for comics to be held up at customs in many countries for a variety of reasons, usually involving sex and violence.
Debating about the first amendment and what is obscene and such is probably pretty valuable, but the issues in this particular case are _much_ simpler, and it's a tragic miscarriage of justice.
I feel so alone now, adrift in an empty Universe...
Wait, I'm not that Kirby. Whew.
Yes, Sierra was working on the title - one of my gaming buddies was a developer on this game. It got cancelled several months after they moved all the programmers from Northern California to Seattle.
As it turns out, a former gaming buddy of mine now works at Turbine in Boston, and is working on this project (in a sysadmin capacity.) Small world! Though, these two friends of mine have never met.
There's no connection whatsoever between the two projects. The only thing that changed hands was the license, no code or design work.
(The former Middle Earth developer is now working on Pirates of the Burning Sea, a pirate MMORPG. Which looks cool, in this early stage of development, and I won't say more.)
I think I'd agree, given that the endpoint is probably not another edition of Perl 6 Essentials, but Programming Perl 4th Edition.
Reasons I think this:
* Parrot Progress. The Parrot team clearly believes Parrot will be in good shape by next summer, to the sum that they've wagered that Python will run faster on Parrot than it does under it's current implementation by next OSCon, or the Python team gets to hit them with cream pies. I'm willing to accept that level of confidence to imply that Parrot will be up to the task of being usable to develop things onto by next year, and quite polished by 2005.
* Ponie (ie, Perl On New Interpreter Engine, ie perl5 on parrot): Someone (and my brain is fuzzy from being sick recently, sorry) is paying two competent developers to work half-time on Ponie for the next two years. Now, timeframes are often very hard to predict going into a project, but the goal is clear: Ponie for OSCon 2005.
So, with those critical building blocks in place, and judging by the fact that most of the hard design work is done (and looks very nice), it's just a simple matter of programming. (That's a joke.) I don't expect Perl6 to beat Ponie out the gate, but there's so much potential synergy between the projects, I boldly predict Larry Wall announcing Perl6 available in a stable version for OSCon 2006.
There's clearly a lot of speculation in this line of thought, and it's not like anyone really knows the answers. I like to think it's at least informed speculation, though. And I'd like nothing better than for it to be done sooner. I'd almost recommend people to _not_ check out this book - the design is so good, I've already come up with at least a dozen places in my code where I've wanted to use a perl6 feature that doesn't exist in perl5.
There's lots of ways to help - coding, design, doc writing, testing - as well as the more indirect method of donations to The Perl Foundation. Which ends up helping some of the key developers (like Larry Wall) work on Perl and still pay his bills and keep his health up.
We're attempting to convince our company to make a donation to the Perl Foundation, given how much we use it for our business. I heartily encourage similar efforts - $500 isn't much for a company, but it can add up quickly.
I was just at the LightningCD Launch Party last weekend, they might be exactly what you want.
Their business model is to use the customer's CD Burners, and they have software to manage the download, burning, and printing of liner notes and such for music that is bought online. I think the client is only for Windows at this point.
Their big focus is to have artist-friendly contracts. They pay 50% or more of revenue to the artist, for every sale, on time.
I'm friends with the founder, so obviously biased, and this is clearly a (relevant) ad, but I do hope they succeed, and can vouch that the people behind this company are real and full of integrity.
And, where else can you buy CDs by John Tynes (author of RPGs Delta Green and Unknown Armies) and the indescribable Old Man Tasty and the Lords of the Future?
Not that people are reading this thread much anymore, but to be fair, I got the game on Sunday, and managed to play it most of the day with no crashing or noticable bugs. Only real complaint was that the server I'd planned to play on was already full by then. Playing with friends has to come in the top three reasons, if not number one, as to what people want to do with these games, so that's a pretty big downer.
But, all things considered, a pretty quick recovery from the initial problems. Nobody will much care about a launch like this in 3 months time. More or less a non-event. Welcome to Slashdot As Usual.
So far, I'm finding combat rather uninteresting, but having a blast with crafting and entertaining, much to my surprise. Not sure if it'll stay fresh after months of doing it, but for now, I'm a happy dancing fool.
Doesn't this imply that the solution, from the Advertiser's perspective, is more frequent, shorter ad breaks?
I have to admit that I'm much more likely to sit through 1 or 2 30 second spots.
I'm not saying I _like_ this idea - it'd make me love my TiVo even more - but it is the logical conclusion to draw if your goal is to have people watch the ads instead of leaving the room.
(I do end up watching ads sometimes, even as a TiVo user. I still watch some things live. Sporting events and first-run shows that I happen to be free when they're on, notably. Yeah, I could wait 20 minutes or so and start the show later to skip the ads, but I usually don't.)
That may be true on I-5 (but doesn't it get quite congested daily), but it's much less true on 520/I-90, and 405.
Going across the bridges is always a bottleneck. These are two and three lane highways, largely geographically bound so that they're difficult to widen, that see a lot of traffic. At the wrong times of day, being able to use the HOV lanes saves a lot of time.
Say what you will about encouraging carpooling - it's clearly a good thing. But it's not practical for everyone, particularly someone whose job routinely requires them to stay extra hours unpredictably. (Like, say, a sysadmin.) What happens when your carpool buddy gets off work, but your server is down? And if you need to move equipment or other heavy things, you don't have a lot of options. It's not a Personal Failing of the driver that they can't make a carpool work for them, necessarily. Historically, the price of this has been to deal with traffic, or take the bus.
That said, I do live in Bellevue and bus in to Downtown Seattle every day. It's not that bad. I get a chance to read and listen to my iPod, and if the traffic is awful, I hardly notice. And it's environmentally sound, too. The number of Scary People on the busses in Seattle is relatively small (especially on the Eastside busses.) A little patience is required, but waiting for a bus is, IMO, preferable to waiting in traffic, so that's a win too.
Ultimately, it's the cost of parking downtown that drives me to use the bus, though.
The fine folks at Baseball Prospectus, the top web site for baseball analysis, asked the question: given that QuestTec is installed at some parks and not others, how is it affecting how the umpires call the game?
The answer: read this espn article.
Good stuff.
Really, most _Americans_ are appalled by the GTA series, once you get outside gamer circles. And even moreso if they've actually _seen_ the game being played. I mean, this is a game where you pull drivers out of cars, beat them to death, and run over pedestrians while trying to avoid the cops.
It doesn't exactly take a puritan to find that disturbing.
(I have played the game, and found it not to my taste. I don't mind that it exists, and hey, if that's what the market likes, so be it, but this is a far stronger case that the game has objectionable content than the typical anti-3D-shooter sentiment.)
If the argument is that we should be hiring programmers under 10, sure, this is a totally valid point.
However, 18 vs. 28 vs. 38, the effect is vastly smaller. And, IMO, more than offset by experience being able to filter out which things to learn and which are mistakes already made. Really, a mix in personalities is good between those that rapidly embrace new ideas, and those that reign in obvious mistakes. (We'll give away our product for free on our web page, how can we lose!)
Then again, maybe the solution really is to fill our dev positions with 8 year olds. Step 3, profit!
Oops. It was 4th when I was growing up. But the city council has had severe anti-growth policies for years (they rejected a Toys-R-Us in town because they didn't want 'that kind of business'), so I'm not surprised to see it falling on the list.
I recall it being about 40,000 circa 1990.
Still, the list is very Portland Metro Area heavy. For some purposes, Gresham, Beaverton, and Hillsboro are Greater Portland (and Springfield is Eugene), so if you count like that...
wait, a minute, what am I doing? I'm arguing a semantic point that's not at all relevant to my point. Argh, I must be on slashdot.
If it's just a straight mileage tax, it's pretty dumb. It's just like the gas tax, but as the article points out, without the incentives to have a fuel efficient car.
To make any sense at all, they'll have to acknowledge that Portland Transportation is VASTLY different than the rest of the state, particularly outside the Willamette Valley. Portland is a city, and has public transportation (not a great system, but it's at least there.) People have alternatives. And it's got a complex city road system.
The rest of the state is mostly rural, with long highway stretches that aren't nearly as expensive to maintain. There aren't bus alternatives most places. Driving 10 miles a day in Baker City is incomparable to driving 10 miles a day in Portland, in terms of impact on the roads.
They allude in the article of having the ability to tell where you are, so charge more for being part of the downtown rush hour vs. on a logging road that sees 10 cars per day. If they use it, they can possibly have the semblance of a fair system. If not, it's business as usual, where the rest of the state pays for things that mostly benefit Portland.
(I grew up in Corvallis. There's real traffic during home OSU games, for the 4th of July fireworks, and when the Jehovah's Witness convention is in town. That's it. And that's the 4th largest city in the State.)
Oregon's in such a financial free-fall right now, though, that anyone that can come through with a way to generate revenue, quickly, will get seriously listened to. So, I wouldn't be surprised to see a badly written new tax fly through without being scrutinzed.