What do you do in your daily life that isn't a repetative menial task that could probably be done better by a machine?
Aside from masturbation, almost nothing. A machine does the dishes, a machine washes my clothes. A machine takes me to and from work.
I:
1. Read. Unless you read the same book over and over again, it's not menial.
2. Mountain bike. Different terrain every time, very difficult, couldn't be automated.
3. Carpentry. Machines do all the menial stuff. I do the unique and interesting work.
4. Dancing. If you write a bash script that can dance for me, more power to you.
5. Roller-hockey. See the above
6. Tennis. (And all other sports for that matter) Again, see above
The leveling aspect of MMORPGs is the very definition of menial. Most players even admit that they don't enjoy it. They just want the levels to be able to do the other, "fun" things in the game. They "work" at leveling in order to be able to "play" with the levels they get.
It would make sense to remove the whole leveling part that no one likes, so people can get to the fun part of the game. But wait! The "fun part" isn't infinite! Players would quickly do everything of interest to them and then quit. The leveling serves only to delay the inevitable "finishing" of the game. It dangles the carrot of fun things to do -later-, forcing the players to pay for the game longer.
Consider this: If these networks are also encrypted, and non-RIAA-signed bands have their files intermixed, the DMCA could actually be used as part of prosecution against the RIAA if they crack the encryption to look for "pirates."
The RIAA has to prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt that the specific copyrighted works were actually shared by the defendant.
That's not as easy as it sounds. Is the file "RIAA band - RIAA band's song.mp3" really that song, or something else entirely? Was the file actually available to be downloaded. Is the user in question really the sharer?
IPs can be spoofed. Files can be misnamed. Computers can be hijacked. It's almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a copyright violation actually occurred, and that the person in question was actually responsible.
Now multiply these complexities by the number of filesharers out there. It's an uphill battle for the RIAA.
On another note, stopping hundreds of us means very little face of the fact that we number in the millions. File shares will likely start moving outside of the United States, where it's much harder to effectively litigate against their operators.
More to the point, the MMORPG genre as a whole is, currently, crap. They're glorified chat rooms that let you click on monsters in order to obtain the power to click on bigger monsters.
The underlying problem is the whole "leveling" concept. MMORPGers for some reason feel the need to be rewarded based on how long they've been playing. "I'm 76th level you 75th level n00b. My member is larger than yours."
Just look at the outcry whenever someone out there is caught using a bot to level. It's sad that people will spend hours and hours of their time doing something so simple and tedious that a shell script can do the exact same thing.
Computers have the power to automate menial, repetitive tasks, yet these people seek these tasks out! All for the sake of having a bigger number next to their pseudonym in a giant chat room.
So what is a "real" MMORPG, as you mention? What makes Everquest better than Rag Online, or an old MUD? They're all fundamentally the same.
Of course, I'm somewhat biased against MMORPG players.;^) Read my journal.
I used to play this back when they first put up an English server. The game is absolutely beautiful, both graphically and musically.
Playing the game, however, was worthless. You know most MMORPGs, where you hit the rats with your little stick until you get enough XP to use the bigger stick to hit the bigger rats until you get enough XP to get the...
Rag is just like that, only with -nothing- else to do. The chat interface was practically useless, and party system didn't work so well. The only reason I played it as long as I did (about two weeks) was the fact that the game itself is pretty enough to distract you from the fact that the gameplay is.. well, useless. Not fun.
On another note, I have a few friends who still play the game off and on. Funny how I remember their usernames... If -only- I knew their passwords....
The problem here is that the majority of people are poor drivers. I blame our driver's education system. Notice, these classes teach very little about vehicle handling or basic mechanical functionality: they teach about the laws and rules of the road.
Now, it's good that Timmy knows the difference between a white line and a yellow line, but that won't help him when he doesn't understand that if he decellerates on a slick curve, the weight of the vehicle will transfer to the front wheels, possibly causing the rear ones to lose traction and induce an oversteer (Timmy spins out and causes an accident).
Or how about proximity? Notice how, when there's a small piece of debris in the road, most drivers give it a good 4-6 feet of berth just because they don't actually have a sense of the boundries of their car.
Driver's education should be rigorous and difficult: not designed so that everyone passes. (How many people -actually- fail Driver's Ed? There was one in my entire high school class of several hundred, and she was, shall we say, half a half-wit ((a quarter-wit?)) ).
As sad as it is that we need such a thing, it's good to have real money (millions and millions) and real lawyers (the kind you can get for.. millions and millions) on our side.
I'm very liberal. The first ammendment is sacred to me. I believe in free speech to the extreme. But, quite frankly, spammers piss me off. Now, I don't mind the KKK, or any of the other myriad hate-mongering groups speaking their collective minds, because it's their right to do so. I very much -do- mind being bombarded with pe3nis e.n.l.a.r.g.e.m.e.n.t..! bullshit.
The difference? The KKK preaches its message to... people who want to hear it! If you don't want to listen, they won't/can't force you. Spammers, however, target everybody, the vast majority of whom do NOT want anything to do with them.
[end_rant]
I've gotta stop posting before I have my coffee.. Just got spammed on my work account, too, so go figure. (I think I have ADHD too. How'd I get from "Microsoft good" to "spam bad" to "KKK something something"?)
Some day, people will pay "Counterstrike 3" instructors the rates they pay golf instructors today, only adding kills instead of shaving strokes.
We'll see video games on television alongside real sports.
We'll see kids passing up college for professional gaming contracts with the big teams.
Now, not any time soon, mind you;^) But think about how much has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years. Imagine how much it will change in the next 80. Our grandkids will look at what we play today the way we look at the games cavemen played with the bones of their dinners ^_^
(I love games.slashdot.org. No one's here yet, so I can ramble on and on and not get modded down;^)
I really can't believe they're actually resuming Shuttle flights. I was worried that we would bury our heads in the sand for a few years like we have after similar accidents in the past.
I'd still like to see an actual, cheap, reusable space vehicle though.. The shuttle isn't so hot on that front (no pun intended).
I though of the nickname "Loser" when I made the post. We didn't call him anything in college. All he ever did was play Asheron's Call. We never saw him make an effort to "interact" with "people." We didn't like him because he was not a person, he was an Asheron's Call machine.
God no. I never knew Loser's real name. I just didn't want to use pronouns for that whole little story.
He was real. Really unnerved Greg, the friend in question. I guess it's creepy to have that sort of person in close proximity for a long period of time.
I attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. My freshman year (so long ago -_-), a friend of mine had a room mate, let's call him Loser.
Now, Loser seemed like a nice guy. He was quiet, he used his computer, ate his grub, and generally stayed out of my friend's way. In fact, he never said anything to my friend, or to anyone else as far as we were aware.
You see, Loser played Asheron's Call. All the time. His body would sit there rigid, unmoving, while he leveled. My friend recalls a specific incident where he woke up to find Loser playing, went to several classes, played some D&D with all of us, and returned over 9 hours later to find him still playing the game. We know Loser had been playing the whole time: he was wearing the same towel he'd had on that morning, and the empty plate we assume he'd eaten breakfast off of was still sitting on his lap.
Loser would ignore fire alarms (which at RIT, which adjoins the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, is no small feat). Loser would forget to eat. Loser would rarely go to class, shave, bathe, or move.
The end of the year came, and Loser went home. He kept his computer hooked up and running right up until his parents had moved everything else to the car. I assume it was the first thing he unpacked.
Loser still goes to RIT as far as I can tell. I saw him in the Engineering building once, so I think he's an engineering student.
Wow.. I describe my typing style to friends exactly the way you describe yours. I didn't think anyone else in the world typed this way ^_^
I use computers a good 10 hours a day (work for IBM, play at home, work from home, etc..), and yet I've never had one whit of a problem with my wrists/arms/fingers/hands.
I've noticed that most people I've known who have these problems use low sensitivity settings for their mice, and often move their whole arm and wrist.
Everyone else I know, however, uses extremely high sensitivity and accelleration settings. (I tweaked the reg keys in Windows to get it as high as I wanted.) I grip the mouse lightly with my fingers, and only they move. My wrist, my arm: both remain stationary. The mouse itself moves no more than a half-inch in any direction no matter what I'm doing (and at 1600px no less).
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that these problems are avoidable, and they're caused by poor practices more than anything else.
In the infinite wisdom of the Polish Doctor from the old joke, "Stop doing that!"
Your point is valid, but it doesn't address the fact that most people don't know or care. They'll use their patent-encumbered product, and then they'll bitch about lack of hardware support or the cost of devices.
They won't, however, put 2 and 2 together on the issue;^)
Slashdot Mirror
What do you do in your daily life that isn't a repetative menial task that could probably be done better by a machine?
Aside from masturbation, almost nothing. A machine does the dishes, a machine washes my clothes. A machine takes me to and from work.
I:
1. Read. Unless you read the same book over and over again, it's not menial.
2. Mountain bike. Different terrain every time, very difficult, couldn't be automated.
3. Carpentry. Machines do all the menial stuff. I do the unique and interesting work.
4. Dancing. If you write a bash script that can dance for me, more power to you.
5. Roller-hockey. See the above
6. Tennis. (And all other sports for that matter) Again, see above
The leveling aspect of MMORPGs is the very definition of menial. Most players even admit that they don't enjoy it. They just want the levels to be able to do the other, "fun" things in the game. They "work" at leveling in order to be able to "play" with the levels they get.
It would make sense to remove the whole leveling part that no one likes, so people can get to the fun part of the game. But wait! The "fun part" isn't infinite! Players would quickly do everything of interest to them and then quit. The leveling serves only to delay the inevitable "finishing" of the game. It dangles the carrot of fun things to do -later-, forcing the players to pay for the game longer.
Especially for MMORPGs. Buggy, lame, boring, unfinished, poorly balanced.... All of these games are released in the same basic state: crap.
There's a reason most beta testers for these games quit when it comes time to pony up the cash.
Consider this: If these networks are also encrypted, and non-RIAA-signed bands have their files intermixed, the DMCA could actually be used as part of prosecution against the RIAA if they crack the encryption to look for "pirates."
The DMCA is a double-edged blade.
The RIAA has to prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt that the specific copyrighted works were actually shared by the defendant.
That's not as easy as it sounds. Is the file "RIAA band - RIAA band's song.mp3" really that song, or something else entirely? Was the file actually available to be downloaded. Is the user in question really the sharer?
IPs can be spoofed. Files can be misnamed. Computers can be hijacked. It's almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a copyright violation actually occurred, and that the person in question was actually responsible.
Now multiply these complexities by the number of filesharers out there. It's an uphill battle for the RIAA.
On another note, stopping hundreds of us means very little face of the fact that we number in the millions. File shares will likely start moving outside of the United States, where it's much harder to effectively litigate against their operators.
Everquest is crap.
;^) Read my journal.
More to the point, the MMORPG genre as a whole is, currently, crap. They're glorified chat rooms that let you click on monsters in order to obtain the power to click on bigger monsters.
The underlying problem is the whole "leveling" concept. MMORPGers for some reason feel the need to be rewarded based on how long they've been playing. "I'm 76th level you 75th level n00b. My member is larger than yours."
Just look at the outcry whenever someone out there is caught using a bot to level. It's sad that people will spend hours and hours of their time doing something so simple and tedious that a shell script can do the exact same thing.
-walk west- -attack monster- -loot monster corpse- -heal- -repeat-
Computers have the power to automate menial, repetitive tasks, yet these people seek these tasks out! All for the sake of having a bigger number next to their pseudonym in a giant chat room.
So what is a "real" MMORPG, as you mention? What makes Everquest better than Rag Online, or an old MUD? They're all fundamentally the same.
Of course, I'm somewhat biased against MMORPG players.
The US isn't their market: Korea is. RO was a flash-in-the-pan money grab in the US. Korea is where their long-term income originates.
I used to play this back when they first put up an English server. The game is absolutely beautiful, both graphically and musically.
Playing the game, however, was worthless. You know most MMORPGs, where you hit the rats with your little stick until you get enough XP to use the bigger stick to hit the bigger rats until you get enough XP to get the...
Rag is just like that, only with -nothing- else to do. The chat interface was practically useless, and party system didn't work so well. The only reason I played it as long as I did (about two weeks) was the fact that the game itself is pretty enough to distract you from the fact that the gameplay is.. well, useless. Not fun.
On another note, I have a few friends who still play the game off and on. Funny how I remember their usernames... If -only- I knew their passwords....
Yes. Yes I do.
Touhcé, mon ami. ^_^
I remember how in Gradius III, entering that code would kill you. Had to use the LR buttons instead of Right and Left.
The problem here is that the majority of people are poor drivers. I blame our driver's education system. Notice, these classes teach very little about vehicle handling or basic mechanical functionality: they teach about the laws and rules of the road.
Now, it's good that Timmy knows the difference between a white line and a yellow line, but that won't help him when he doesn't understand that if he decellerates on a slick curve, the weight of the vehicle will transfer to the front wheels, possibly causing the rear ones to lose traction and induce an oversteer (Timmy spins out and causes an accident).
Or how about proximity? Notice how, when there's a small piece of debris in the road, most drivers give it a good 4-6 feet of berth just because they don't actually have a sense of the boundries of their car.
Driver's education should be rigorous and difficult: not designed so that everyone passes. (How many people -actually- fail Driver's Ed? There was one in my entire high school class of several hundred, and she was, shall we say, half a half-wit ((a quarter-wit?)) ).
[end_rant]
Yea, I used to snooze in class. Then I realized I could just skip them.
Umm, the Select makes the game two-player. You know, so you can play with a friend? (And get twice as many effective lives.)
As sad as it is that we need such a thing, it's good to have real money (millions and millions) and real lawyers (the kind you can get for.. millions and millions) on our side.
I'm very liberal. The first ammendment is sacred to me. I believe in free speech to the extreme. But, quite frankly, spammers piss me off. Now, I don't mind the KKK, or any of the other myriad hate-mongering groups speaking their collective minds, because it's their right to do so. I very much -do- mind being bombarded with pe3nis e.n.l.a.r.g.e.m.e.n.t..! bullshit.
The difference? The KKK preaches its message to... people who want to hear it! If you don't want to listen, they won't/can't force you. Spammers, however, target everybody, the vast majority of whom do NOT want anything to do with them.
[end_rant]
I've gotta stop posting before I have my coffee.. Just got spammed on my work account, too, so go figure. (I think I have ADHD too. How'd I get from "Microsoft good" to "spam bad" to "KKK something something"?)
Some day, people will pay "Counterstrike 3" instructors the rates they pay golf instructors today, only adding kills instead of shaving strokes.
;^) But think about how much has changed in the gaming industry in the past 20 years. Imagine how much it will change in the next 80. Our grandkids will look at what we play today the way we look at the games cavemen played with the bones of their dinners ^_^
;^)
We'll see video games on television alongside real sports.
We'll see kids passing up college for professional gaming contracts with the big teams.
Now, not any time soon, mind you
(I love games.slashdot.org. No one's here yet, so I can ramble on and on and not get modded down
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, SELECT, Start.
You obviously didn't have friends when you were young ^_^
I really can't believe they're actually resuming Shuttle flights. I was worried that we would bury our heads in the sand for a few years like we have after similar accidents in the past.
I'd still like to see an actual, cheap, reusable space vehicle though.. The shuttle isn't so hot on that front (no pun intended).
I suggest you read my latest /. journal entry. This whole episode made me think.
Are you Loser?
I'm just curious.
I though of the nickname "Loser" when I made the post. We didn't call him anything in college. All he ever did was play Asheron's Call. We never saw him make an effort to "interact" with "people." We didn't like him because he was not a person, he was an Asheron's Call machine.
God no. I never knew Loser's real name. I just didn't want to use pronouns for that whole little story.
He was real. Really unnerved Greg, the friend in question. I guess it's creepy to have that sort of person in close proximity for a long period of time.
I attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. My freshman year (so long ago -_-), a friend of mine had a room mate, let's call him Loser.
Now, Loser seemed like a nice guy. He was quiet, he used his computer, ate his grub, and generally stayed out of my friend's way. In fact, he never said anything to my friend, or to anyone else as far as we were aware.
You see, Loser played Asheron's Call. All the time. His body would sit there rigid, unmoving, while he leveled. My friend recalls a specific incident where he woke up to find Loser playing, went to several classes, played some D&D with all of us, and returned over 9 hours later to find him still playing the game. We know Loser had been playing the whole time: he was wearing the same towel he'd had on that morning, and the empty plate we assume he'd eaten breakfast off of was still sitting on his lap.
Loser would ignore fire alarms (which at RIT, which adjoins the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, is no small feat). Loser would forget to eat. Loser would rarely go to class, shave, bathe, or move.
The end of the year came, and Loser went home. He kept his computer hooked up and running right up until his parents had moved everything else to the car. I assume it was the first thing he unpacked.
Loser still goes to RIT as far as I can tell. I saw him in the Engineering building once, so I think he's an engineering student.
I never liked Loser. I wonder why...
Yea, yea, bad form replying to self and all that. Notice I didn't use my karma bonus ;^)
Ahem..
-------
A man goes to the doctor.
Man: Doctor, doctor! My arm! Whenever I move it like this -moves arm a certain way-, it hurts! What should I do!?
Doctor: It only hurts when you move it that way?
Man: Yes.
Doctor: Then don't move it that way.
Wow.. I describe my typing style to friends exactly the way you describe yours. I didn't think anyone else in the world typed this way ^_^
;^)
I use computers a good 10 hours a day (work for IBM, play at home, work from home, etc..), and yet I've never had one whit of a problem with my wrists/arms/fingers/hands.
We need to spread the word
I've noticed that most people I've known who have these problems use low sensitivity settings for their mice, and often move their whole arm and wrist .
Everyone else I know, however, uses extremely high sensitivity and accelleration settings. (I tweaked the reg keys in Windows to get it as high as I wanted.) I grip the mouse lightly with my fingers, and only they move. My wrist, my arm: both remain stationary. The mouse itself moves no more than a half-inch in any direction no matter what I'm doing (and at 1600px no less).
I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that these problems are avoidable, and they're caused by poor practices more than anything else.
In the infinite wisdom of the Polish Doctor from the old joke, "Stop doing that!"
Your point is valid, but it doesn't address the fact that most people don't know or care. They'll use their patent-encumbered product, and then they'll bitch about lack of hardware support or the cost of devices.
;^)
They won't, however, put 2 and 2 together on the issue