I've had the same complaint. It's fun to watch the UK Robot Wars (I found Battlebots rather dull by comparison), but they're really just big, dangerous RC cars, as far as I'm concerned.
My wife thinks they should allow fully autonomous bots in the ring with the RC bots, but give them a 4X weight allowance, or 6X if they're autonomous walkers. (In the current rules, RC walkers have a 100kg allowance over other heavyweight bots.)
Terrorhurtz has an incredible axe. I've seen it rip huge chunks out of the arena floor, and they can whipsaw it back and forth so fast the entire bot (they're huge and heavy) jumps around in the air. It's pretty insane.
And to the person who replied regarding flippers -- they are currently and have always been in the UK Robot Wars. One of the most amazing is Wheely Big Cheese, which is capable of flipping any competitor robot completely out of the arena from any point in the arena. It's pretty amazing to watch it in action.
There is something similar to that which is a frequent competitor in the Robot Wars series from the UK. The difference is that it's a tube with large wheels on either end, and the batteries and componentry is inside the wheels. It has a large "tail" extending from the middle, which it can flip back and forth to bash the opposition. It isn't terribly destructive, but its long-life means there is a cumulative effect from the constant battering, and it is both very fast and very manuverable. Unfortunately, it's been about six months since I watched the show, so the name of the bot escapes me -- but it's a highly effective design, and over the years it has won quite a few competitions.
I used to have a bunch of Star screenshots and one of them had simple round radio-buttons in a list, so it seems safe to assume PARC or the Xerox SDD invented them for the either the Alto or the Star. The Stanford NLS was the first GUI, but it didn't have radio buttons, or most of the other things we associated with a GUI, although the NLS was the inspiration behind the Alto.
As for your crispness point -- you may be exactly on the mark. Google for some screenshots of Office XP (I'm assuming you're a Mac guy and probably don't have access to the app itself). The roundness is gone. Flat and sharp-edged is back, along with some fairly nice color combos. MS Office tends to give a sneak preview of the look of the next rev of Windows, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn has this "flat" look. Actually, it's more of a combination of flat and 3D, where most stuff looks 3D until you interact with it. When things become active they seem to use what I can only describe as a no-nonsense flat appearance, albiet with some nice attention to color.
Of course, it's hard to imagine a GUI would use anything other than sharp or rounded edges. I can't imagine people warming up to furry windows and buttons. Ew.
While I've been modded into oblivion in other slashdot articles for pointing out that I'd like to see CompactFlash replace floppies, I wouldn't recommend the JumpDrive.
Lexar is pretty bad when it comes to driver support. For several years I only bought Lexar JumpShot cards, but under some XP installations their drivers just won't work. I contacted their tech support multiple times and just got the typical clueless low-rent Somewhere-In-India crap in response. Luckily my laptop's CF slot can read them.
Their awful support makes me especially angry since I've bought so many (three 256MB cards, two 128MB cards... for a month-long trip to Europe).
As for price... you can still buy 4MB CF cards for only about $3.50, and most of my CF-enabled devices came with a freebie 8MB card. And the nice thing about it is, if you suddenly need more space, just use a bigger card. Very convenient.
What's absurd is that you're willing to accept a military assualt on your nation's own soil, one which results in more than 3,000 simultaneous deaths and billions of dollars in damage, as a mere "risk involved in the world".
What's absurd is that you'd be so stupid as to compare the simple outright murder of thousands of people -- to the risks you imagine exist when you take "a walk in the hills".
So tell me, Voice of Restraint, where do you draw the line? After all, Ted Bundy offing all those college girls wasn't even a blip on the radar compared to the annual rate of homicides in the US. Why all the hoopla? Leave the poor guy alone! All the sensational "serial killer" headlines did was encourage him. Heck, I'm not a college girl -- it's far more dangerous for me to cross the street, or take a walk in the hills.
I don't personally believe a "war on terror" can succeed, but that isn't at all the same as being willing to pretend that it is somehow normal and should be accepted. You should be embarassed to have written such spineless crap.
As far as these "terrorists" are concerned, America and the UK are evil operatives in some primitive religious war. And when I say "evil", I mean it literally, in the basic religous working-for-the-wrong-team sense of the word.
Their viewpoint isn't remotely oriented to a concept like terrorism.
As victims of terrorism, our initial basic preference is simply that the whole problem be laid to rest. On the other hand, their initial preference is that we die.
Today the situation has escalated to the point that we feel it is necessary to hunt them down and often, even kill them, but even we don't prefer that solution, otherwise there wouldn't be hordes of them cooling their heels in Cuba. We'd just have executed them. We have simply concluded that warfare is the only way to make enough of an impression that we have any chance of ending terrorism.
(I don't personally think it'll work, due to the nature of the opposition -- but your sappy and stupid "let's just understand the poor terrorists" viewpoint is a load of shit, and a dangerous one at that. They don't give a fuck if you understand them -- they want you to die. It really is that simple.)
With very, very few exceptions, in games, as in real life, I really don't care who or what you choose to sleep with. It seems highly irrelevant and forced to me.
As for "white male" avatars, most of the decent games I can think of that have been released within the past... oh, six or seven years... have a wide array of avatars to choose from -- both sexes, many complexions, many variations on facial features, and hell, half the time you don't even have to be HUMAN.
If this was a post instead of an Official Article, it would have been rated flamebait.
I have a Mac-junkie friend with a desk drawer full of Newtons who might disagree with you. Luckily, he never got around to buying an iTunes, so he may not even be aware of that whole replacement-battery problem, or the crappy $100-battery "solution". Although he wasn't too amused when I pointed out the folklore.org discussion about the original Mac being a $1500 machine, even though they jacked up the price by a thousand bucks at the last minute.
I suppose we could also talk about unpleasantries such as the firmware-update disappearing-RAM fiasco in 2001, or the refusal to compensate iBook buyers in 2000 for cracks in the case, or that little problem with fires on the original PowerBooks, or that free-but-then-not-free.mac deal... boy, you Mac guys must Think Really Different.
Ha, and most those came from just a minute or two of Googling with the words "apple screwed". I probably missed a lot of really good stuff.
I was wondering if anyone was going to make that connection. Amazing that it doesn't show up until page 3... (with my/. paging settings, anyway, which are maxxed out).
I'd say many skills do transfer (such as driving), but shooting absolutely doesn't since shooting in a game doesn't remotely rely upon the same real-world skills required for shooting an actual gun.
In one of the Doom 3 speeches or interviews last year, Carmack pointed out that they made the Doom 3 targeting code highly accurate, and everyone in the office was stunned to realize that they were really, really bad shots... And you KNOW those guys have a hell of a lot of FPS seat-time...
I don't think most people have a problem competing for jobs with ACTUAL immigrants -- people who come and live in the US, and are therefore at least facing the same basic cost of living, taxes, and so on. The original poster may have been arguing about that, but I think he was muddling it up a bit since most people really didn't get seriously bent out of shape until the offshoring thing started eating us alive.
If I had to pick on anything in his post, I'd have chosen this bit:
The globalists are afraid that the American IT boom would cause such a huge surplus that we would pay off the national debt. Then the globalists bankers won't make any money off the $7 trillion U.S. Debt. So the globalists decided to throw a bomb into the American IT market to destroy it in order to preserve their investment.
That's some pretty creative conspiracy-theory work, and it supposes a level of cooperation and coordination which I seriously doubt exists even in government, let alone within Corporate America.
I would submit that there is a wide, wide range of options between "playing well with the world" and cutting the legs out from under the very people who make the country as successful and important as it is today. I have no problem with playing nice. I also have no problem with leveraging our strengths while they exist. I also have no problem with India taking advantage of our stupidity and short-sighted greed. I do have big problems with the people who bring down the axe on American necks, day after day, to feed that greed.
Besides, who says this trend will raise anyone's opinion of us? You only have to browse slashdot for ten or fifteen minutes to find any number of non-Americans ranting and raving about what evil sons of bitches we all must be, and we've already started the process of gutting ourselves that is supposed to endear us to everyone once we collapse into ruin...
Those are undoubtedly work-ethics problems, and I'm not saying the US doesn't have what I consider a declining work-ethic, I'm just saying that the earlier post misapplied the label.
So, how does the cultural option of considering them company property mitigage simple laziness?
We have a pretty good NuTone central vac in our current house. We're selling the house and it's a big selling point with some people, but frankly we never used it. I don't know if other systems are like this, but the NuTone systems have electrical power that runs to the vaccuum "head" via a cord running down the vac hose. The whole thing is extremely bulky and heavy -- the inconvenience of lugging it around is not really offset by the convenience of not using a regular vaccuum cleaner.
Other systems may work differently (although I can't imagine how), but as the owner of one, I wouldn't recommend anyone spend money on them.
We certainly didn't spec one out for our new house.
Oh yeah, and replacement parts are ungodly expensive -- the handle broke on ours, and a new one was about $600, and that was the mid-range option.
We got this huge country with few historical barriers and flourished.
You're forgetting that we had to fight quite a few wars, including one against the reigning superpower of the day, in order to secure this country. It was hardly a handout.
look at the percentage of innovations in the tech and science and medical fields. I would bet that there is a dispreportionate amount of innovations credited to people who are not American-born
I don't know about "disproportionate", but I could agree to "proportionate". However, who is likely to have exploited many of those innovations? Who is most likely to have turned them into usable, off-the-shelf, over-the-counter, pick-up-the-phone-and-order products and services? Americans.
we build this great nation because of immigrants
Irrelevant. We aren't talking about immigrants, we're talking about sending jobs to other countries. Those people aren't planning to move here. Why would they? There aren't any jobs left here.
remember where the head developer for Linux is from
Big deal, he ripped off UNIX. Now where did that whole UNIX thing get started? Hmmm...
I really hope you are not the racist you come off as. It will only hurt you.
His comments may have been rather sweeping generalizations, and they were certainly stated in a very inflammatory fashion, but they weren't particularly racist (unless you're European; it seems to me the Europeans have a very different concept of "race" than we have in the US -- namely that it can apply to nationality, whereas the US version is primiarly concerned with genetic lineage, for lack of a better term coming to mind).
You have a novel definition of "work ethic". If the Japanese viewpoint is that the employee is the "property" of the company, that is unrelated to the work ethic. Nothing about that prohibits a good or bad attitude towards working on the employee's part, which is where "work ethic" comes into play.
What has been lost is LOYALTY. American companies no longer demonstrate loyalty to their employees or to the country -- although they go to great lengths to provide the appearance of doing so, which demonstrates that they understand that being caught at this game will cost them in terms of public opinion, and which further illustrates the hypocrisy in the way these companies are run. Conversely, employees have no loyalty to their companies -- here you can quote a change in work ethic to some degree -- but this erosion of employee loyalty is largely a response to your job, your life, your effort, your knowledge, your skills, your needs, and your income being treated as a disposable line-item expense, to be eliminated the moment the stock ticker dips far enough to run the CEO's bonus into the low-rent seven-digit territory.
The concept of "Human Resources" is one of the worst things that could have happened to the modern employment scene.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had the same complaint. It's fun to watch the UK Robot Wars (I found Battlebots rather dull by comparison), but they're really just big, dangerous RC cars, as far as I'm concerned.
My wife thinks they should allow fully autonomous bots in the ring with the RC bots, but give them a 4X weight allowance, or 6X if they're autonomous walkers. (In the current rules, RC walkers have a 100kg allowance over other heavyweight bots.)
Terrorhurtz has an incredible axe. I've seen it rip huge chunks out of the arena floor, and they can whipsaw it back and forth so fast the entire bot (they're huge and heavy) jumps around in the air. It's pretty insane.
And to the person who replied regarding flippers -- they are currently and have always been in the UK Robot Wars. One of the most amazing is Wheely Big Cheese, which is capable of flipping any competitor robot completely out of the arena from any point in the arena. It's pretty amazing to watch it in action.
There is something similar to that which is a frequent competitor in the Robot Wars series from the UK. The difference is that it's a tube with large wheels on either end, and the batteries and componentry is inside the wheels. It has a large "tail" extending from the middle, which it can flip back and forth to bash the opposition. It isn't terribly destructive, but its long-life means there is a cumulative effect from the constant battering, and it is both very fast and very manuverable. Unfortunately, it's been about six months since I watched the show, so the name of the bot escapes me -- but it's a highly effective design, and over the years it has won quite a few competitions.
Ah, how nice to have the good Senator join us in person!
And the steam inside would cause it to explode because of... pressure differences.
Steam itself is not a terribly volatile substance...
LOL
The Mac had 'em round before Windows.
And Xerox had them round before anybody.
I used to have a bunch of Star screenshots and one of them had simple round radio-buttons in a list, so it seems safe to assume PARC or the Xerox SDD invented them for the either the Alto or the Star. The Stanford NLS was the first GUI, but it didn't have radio buttons, or most of the other things we associated with a GUI, although the NLS was the inspiration behind the Alto.
As for your crispness point -- you may be exactly on the mark. Google for some screenshots of Office XP (I'm assuming you're a Mac guy and probably don't have access to the app itself). The roundness is gone. Flat and sharp-edged is back, along with some fairly nice color combos. MS Office tends to give a sneak preview of the look of the next rev of Windows, so I wouldn't be too surprised if Longhorn has this "flat" look. Actually, it's more of a combination of flat and 3D, where most stuff looks 3D until you interact with it. When things become active they seem to use what I can only describe as a no-nonsense flat appearance, albiet with some nice attention to color.
Of course, it's hard to imagine a GUI would use anything other than sharp or rounded edges. I can't imagine people warming up to furry windows and buttons. Ew.
While I've been modded into oblivion in other slashdot articles for pointing out that I'd like to see CompactFlash replace floppies, I wouldn't recommend the JumpDrive.
Lexar is pretty bad when it comes to driver support. For several years I only bought Lexar JumpShot cards, but under some XP installations their drivers just won't work. I contacted their tech support multiple times and just got the typical clueless low-rent Somewhere-In-India crap in response. Luckily my laptop's CF slot can read them.
Their awful support makes me especially angry since I've bought so many (three 256MB cards, two 128MB cards... for a month-long trip to Europe).
As for price... you can still buy 4MB CF cards for only about $3.50, and most of my CF-enabled devices came with a freebie 8MB card. And the nice thing about it is, if you suddenly need more space, just use a bigger card. Very convenient.
You should be modded way, way up.
Shit, they should just attach your comment to the end of the article.
What's absurd is that you're willing to accept a military assualt on your nation's own soil, one which results in more than 3,000 simultaneous deaths and billions of dollars in damage, as a mere "risk involved in the world".
What's absurd is that you'd be so stupid as to compare the simple outright murder of thousands of people -- to the risks you imagine exist when you take "a walk in the hills".
So tell me, Voice of Restraint, where do you draw the line? After all, Ted Bundy offing all those college girls wasn't even a blip on the radar compared to the annual rate of homicides in the US. Why all the hoopla? Leave the poor guy alone! All the sensational "serial killer" headlines did was encourage him. Heck, I'm not a college girl -- it's far more dangerous for me to cross the street, or take a walk in the hills.
I don't personally believe a "war on terror" can succeed, but that isn't at all the same as being willing to pretend that it is somehow normal and should be accepted. You should be embarassed to have written such spineless crap.
Bullshit.
As far as these "terrorists" are concerned, America and the UK are evil operatives in some primitive religious war. And when I say "evil", I mean it literally, in the basic religous working-for-the-wrong-team sense of the word.
Their viewpoint isn't remotely oriented to a concept like terrorism.
As victims of terrorism, our initial basic preference is simply that the whole problem be laid to rest. On the other hand, their initial preference is that we die.
Today the situation has escalated to the point that we feel it is necessary to hunt them down and often, even kill them, but even we don't prefer that solution, otherwise there wouldn't be hordes of them cooling their heels in Cuba. We'd just have executed them. We have simply concluded that warfare is the only way to make enough of an impression that we have any chance of ending terrorism.
(I don't personally think it'll work, due to the nature of the opposition -- but your sappy and stupid "let's just understand the poor terrorists" viewpoint is a load of shit, and a dangerous one at that. They don't give a fuck if you understand them -- they want you to die. It really is that simple.)
With very, very few exceptions, in games, as in real life, I really don't care who or what you choose to sleep with. It seems highly irrelevant and forced to me.
As for "white male" avatars, most of the decent games I can think of that have been released within the past... oh, six or seven years... have a wide array of avatars to choose from -- both sexes, many complexions, many variations on facial features, and hell, half the time you don't even have to be HUMAN.
If this was a post instead of an Official Article, it would have been rated flamebait.
Who fucking cares?
They will NEVER intentionally screw the customer.
.mac deal... boy, you Mac guys must Think Really Different.
I have a Mac-junkie friend with a desk drawer full of Newtons who might disagree with you. Luckily, he never got around to buying an iTunes, so he may not even be aware of that whole replacement-battery problem, or the crappy $100-battery "solution". Although he wasn't too amused when I pointed out the folklore.org discussion about the original Mac being a $1500 machine, even though they jacked up the price by a thousand bucks at the last minute.
I suppose we could also talk about unpleasantries such as the firmware-update disappearing-RAM fiasco in 2001, or the refusal to compensate iBook buyers in 2000 for cracks in the case, or that little problem with fires on the original PowerBooks, or that free-but-then-not-free
Ha, and most those came from just a minute or two of Googling with the words "apple screwed". I probably missed a lot of really good stuff.
That's a strange thing to call Death Valley.
I was wondering if anyone was going to make that connection. Amazing that it doesn't show up until page 3... (with my /. paging settings, anyway, which are maxxed out).
I'd say many skills do transfer (such as driving), but shooting absolutely doesn't since shooting in a game doesn't remotely rely upon the same real-world skills required for shooting an actual gun.
In one of the Doom 3 speeches or interviews last year, Carmack pointed out that they made the Doom 3 targeting code highly accurate, and everyone in the office was stunned to realize that they were really, really bad shots... And you KNOW those guys have a hell of a lot of FPS seat-time...
"Whom" should be used with a verb transitive.
The grade-school explanation is a verb which shows "action towards".
I don't think most people have a problem competing for jobs with ACTUAL immigrants -- people who come and live in the US, and are therefore at least facing the same basic cost of living, taxes, and so on. The original poster may have been arguing about that, but I think he was muddling it up a bit since most people really didn't get seriously bent out of shape until the offshoring thing started eating us alive.
If I had to pick on anything in his post, I'd have chosen this bit:
The globalists are afraid that the American IT boom would cause such a huge surplus that we would pay off the national debt. Then the globalists bankers won't make any money off the $7 trillion U.S. Debt. So the globalists decided to throw a bomb into the American IT market to destroy it in order to preserve their investment.
That's some pretty creative conspiracy-theory work, and it supposes a level of cooperation and coordination which I seriously doubt exists even in government, let alone within Corporate America.
I would submit that there is a wide, wide range of options between "playing well with the world" and cutting the legs out from under the very people who make the country as successful and important as it is today. I have no problem with playing nice. I also have no problem with leveraging our strengths while they exist. I also have no problem with India taking advantage of our stupidity and short-sighted greed. I do have big problems with the people who bring down the axe on American necks, day after day, to feed that greed.
Besides, who says this trend will raise anyone's opinion of us? You only have to browse slashdot for ten or fifteen minutes to find any number of non-Americans ranting and raving about what evil sons of bitches we all must be, and we've already started the process of gutting ourselves that is supposed to endear us to everyone once we collapse into ruin...
How can Americans not be immigrants if our "whole country is made up of immigrants"?
Those are undoubtedly work-ethics problems, and I'm not saying the US doesn't have what I consider a declining work-ethic, I'm just saying that the earlier post misapplied the label.
So, how does the cultural option of considering them company property mitigage simple laziness?
We have a pretty good NuTone central vac in our current house. We're selling the house and it's a big selling point with some people, but frankly we never used it. I don't know if other systems are like this, but the NuTone systems have electrical power that runs to the vaccuum "head" via a cord running down the vac hose. The whole thing is extremely bulky and heavy -- the inconvenience of lugging it around is not really offset by the convenience of not using a regular vaccuum cleaner.
Other systems may work differently (although I can't imagine how), but as the owner of one, I wouldn't recommend anyone spend money on them.
We certainly didn't spec one out for our new house.
Oh yeah, and replacement parts are ungodly expensive -- the handle broke on ours, and a new one was about $600, and that was the mid-range option.
Because you americans are a bunch of useless idiots.
Then, four sentences later:
Your whole country is made of immigrants
Connect the dots.
I won't even bother with the total disconnect in your concluding sentence.
We got this huge country with few historical barriers and flourished.
You're forgetting that we had to fight quite a few wars, including one against the reigning superpower of the day, in order to secure this country. It was hardly a handout.
look at the percentage of innovations in the tech and science and medical fields. I would bet that there is a dispreportionate amount of innovations credited to people who are not American-born
I don't know about "disproportionate", but I could agree to "proportionate". However, who is likely to have exploited many of those innovations? Who is most likely to have turned them into usable, off-the-shelf, over-the-counter, pick-up-the-phone-and-order products and services? Americans.
we build this great nation because of immigrants
Irrelevant. We aren't talking about immigrants, we're talking about sending jobs to other countries. Those people aren't planning to move here. Why would they? There aren't any jobs left here.
remember where the head developer for Linux is from
Big deal, he ripped off UNIX. Now where did that whole UNIX thing get started? Hmmm...
I really hope you are not the racist you come off as. It will only hurt you.
His comments may have been rather sweeping generalizations, and they were certainly stated in a very inflammatory fashion, but they weren't particularly racist (unless you're European; it seems to me the Europeans have a very different concept of "race" than we have in the US -- namely that it can apply to nationality, whereas the US version is primiarly concerned with genetic lineage, for lack of a better term coming to mind).
You have a novel definition of "work ethic". If the Japanese viewpoint is that the employee is the "property" of the company, that is unrelated to the work ethic. Nothing about that prohibits a good or bad attitude towards working on the employee's part, which is where "work ethic" comes into play.
What has been lost is LOYALTY. American companies no longer demonstrate loyalty to their employees or to the country -- although they go to great lengths to provide the appearance of doing so, which demonstrates that they understand that being caught at this game will cost them in terms of public opinion, and which further illustrates the hypocrisy in the way these companies are run. Conversely, employees have no loyalty to their companies -- here you can quote a change in work ethic to some degree -- but this erosion of employee loyalty is largely a response to your job, your life, your effort, your knowledge, your skills, your needs, and your income being treated as a disposable line-item expense, to be eliminated the moment the stock ticker dips far enough to run the CEO's bonus into the low-rent seven-digit territory.
The concept of "Human Resources" is one of the worst things that could have happened to the modern employment scene.
We are people, not office furniture.
I love that sig...