78s! Young punks! Back in the day, we didn't have no steenking disc recordings for our music. No, we had good old wax cylinders, the way God and Tom Edison intended!
You cranked the thing with your hand just to make it run! It was impossible to go at a steady pace, so your orchestra playing sweet old Beethoven's 5th sounded like a china cabinet tumbling down stairs, and Carmen sounded like a goat choking on its own scrotum! And we liked it!
Ya cranked it until your sweat dripped on it and then you got your ass beat. Ya went to your room and cried, and when mom and dad went away, you tried to hump the cylinder while thinking about Mary Jane Johnston's wrist, which you saw once when you went over there for milk, and mom and dad would get home early and catch you and you got your ass beat again.
> Heh, but that won't happen. Supply and demand will kick in and I think we'll all see > just how many people there are in the world. I imagine supply will be about 1/2 to 1/4 > what the demand will be, so prices will go up.
Perhaps you are confused as to the nature of a democracy.
It's bad enough an elected Congresscritter will have to ride out "hundreds of thousands of complaints", so they won't, and will push it back yet again.
But trying to tell those who elect you, "Tough! Go out now and buy the overpriced converters or new style TVs, both in short supply at the moment" just isn't going to happen.
And I've got news for you. Techno-nerds vote much less than do old folks or pissed-off folks.
And the spartan use of color to offset THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED really scare you into thinking you're doing something wrong, and that somebody's gonna catch you!
Really gets the heart pumping. Well done, Blizzard!
There's several issues here, and none of them would fix the problem in the 2000 election, sorry.
1. Get rid of electors -- Aside from the occasional "faithless" elector, there's still the problem of what happens when, say, the president elect dies before taking office. Would be nice if this were cleared up with the same stroke. But that' won't solve the problem in 2000 since states would still be "winner take all".
2. Demanding the presidency be a nationwide pure popular vote also wouldn't solve the problem as you will have close nationwide elections anyway. And the "winner take all" concept, technically separate from the electors system, has benefits you don't necessarily want to get rid of just because your party got stung at one election over it. It's been to your benefit as much as your detriment, to say nothing of losing the "big mandate" exaggeration the electoral system provides -- a party relying on "big mandates" to get social spending passed could be burned a lot more than helped.
> Things like this can really piss off a gamer, but thankfully are mostly disappearing from > today's games, as AI programming has advanced enough to not require the use of such.
Oh, you know what I hate? It's what I call "Sim Ant Syndrome"
In Sim Ant, you simulated an entire ant colony, though you could take charge of any ant you wanted in order to move it somewhere, usually to leave a chemical trail to food or a battle.
So far so good. But the enemy ant colony always made a bee line (so to speak) for whatever ant you had posessed, whether you left a chemical trail or not. If you switched ants, the other ants always immediately switched to attack that new ant -- even before you had done anything with it.
Mech Warrior Mercenaries, the best Mech game I've ever played, also suffered from this. You'd go out with your two wingmen and the opposing triad of mechs would always come after you, end of story.
So I put Sim Ant Syndrome to work for me, and got in the little 160 mph zipper robot, and assigned the Atlas D and Atlas K to my wingmen, and ran all over the place while they slowly chewed up the idiots always gunning for me.
Ahhh, the good old Atlas D. There was a point 2/3 through the game where the mechs you "found" started being seriously upgraded from your already-looted stable of mechs, thus making obsolete all the old mechs -- except the monstrous Atlas D, which was so massive it could still stand up to the new mech pounding, and could loadout enough stuff to fight back more than effectively. And the Atlas K, the new mech's Atlas, sheesh.
Within a few levels of the Atlas K, though, the game got to a point where it would crash when I got to a certain spot and I couldn't get around it, even reverting to a fairly ancient saved game. And that was with the final patch ever released. I wonder if anyone ever finished MWM on "hardest".
"Don't hurt me daddy!" setting, with a bonnet and a pacifier in his mouth. Good times...
Once you completed Serious Sam on Serious (which I did, solo), it unlocked "You are not serious" difficulty, which seemed to be about the same except the monsters faded in and out of visibility over a few second cycle.
I've seen games do this before. I think City of Heroes missions are like this.
It won't rescue you from being pounded over and over in a mission that's way over your head, but if you're "almost there", a subsequent attempt can be easier.
For example, typical missions may have spawns of 1 minion and 1 lieutenant, while later retries might use 3 minions and 0 lieutenants, which is mildly easier. Of course, this may also just be a fallout of them treating the two spawn types as roughly equivalent in difficulty.
Or maybe not.
For online games, though, it's hard to find fellow insane partners to tackle the toughest of things when you can just wimp the difficulty or skip it altogether.
They really need a new class of server just for insane people.
Was it the first Real FPS game (forget what it's called) that had a dynamic AI? It would literally learn your techniques (such as you jump out from a corner, shoot, and leap back behind it, repeat.
Well, a few times of that, and the bad guy would shoot a second time, perfectly timed for when you re-leapt out to hit you.
So one minute, you're leaping out, back, out, back, out, monster dead.
The next you leap out, back, out, bam, you're dead.
I absolutely love setting the highest difficulty as a challenge for games.
One of the most brilliant "hardest" settings was in Thief, where in the hardest setting, you were not allowed to kill anybody. Hence the whole game became a puzzle of sneaking, with no more than blackjacking someone.
Countless times I heard someone talk about how good they got with the sword in Thief, but I always wondered what the point of that was. If I wanted melee action I'd play some other game.
Accomplishments on Hardest, Never Looking Up Solutions Online
Duke Nukem (2nd hardest setting -- hardest was with respawn, designed for multiplayer action)
Icewind Dale II on Heart of Fury mode, with 2 true level 1 characters, no imported items. Realized this could probably be done with 1 fighter, though I didn't try it. And no, I'm not lying. You didn't think the bards wrote tales about your pathetic adventures, did you?
Serious Sam on Serious, but certain times ammo would run short and the only option was to rocket jump somewhere mildly safe and slowly pick off people with your magical recharging revolvers or whatever it was.
Quake, 2 Expansion Packs, Quake II, etc., on Nightmare. This includes finding the Nightmare settings mechanism, done cleverly and in-game.
Duplicated the 30s Lava God quick run in Quake, but with an embarassingly slow 36 second time.
All 120 or 125 levels of original Lemmings without looking up any answers. Got interested because a "high-Q" colleague couldn't solve one of the levels. Included hacking it myself to get around the shareware limit on 5 game starts. Ahh, puzzles.
Both KoToR games. Of course, "hard" is a joke on those games, with the exception of the boss encounters. (Try going to Korriban immediately after training to be a Jedi in the first one, then getting by Calo.) Set a goal of trying to make these encounters as easy as possible while soloing whenever not required by the story to take someone along. Final runthroughs involved manhandling Calo at both encounters as well as utter devastation of all other boss encounters, and taking 18 levels of Jedi (which meant getting to Dantooine by only leveling to level 2, which is required to leave the damaged ship in the beginning.) For KoToR II, I eventually manhandled the undead guy in the Korriban encounter (such that Kreia "saving" you by psychically telling you to flee seemed idiotic) and was able to 2-shot, but not quite 1-shot, the undead guy in the second, endgame encounter, indefinitely. So I could have, in fact, stood there fighting him forever. In theory I could have one-shot him had all the rolls hit superbly, but that never actually happened.
Starcraft -- Another game where "hard" wasn't really that hard. But I like to point out that Tassadar was an idiot for feeling he had to sacrifice himself. I had the brain well under control, thxbie.
Total Annihilation -- Meteor level, need I say more. Geeze.
And some (partial) failures
Kingpin on "Real" mode -- More of a novelty, if you got shot or clubbed, you pretty much died, as you should. Tough to make it past the first guy with a club since you didn't have your gun yet, and the AI, built on hitting you a number of times before you died, getting you very quickly. Never made it past the first level.
Warcraft III -- Not a failure per se -- I made it 2/3 the way through the second act before quitting out of raw hatred for the way they made it more difficult. For example, your towers couldn't out-shoot the meatwagons, hence you always had to send out a party to intercept them. I only found one spot on one map where I could place a tower at an elevation so high that it outshot a meatwagon, and it felt as if the devs had missed that spot.:( Still, I managed to survive and get all the optional goals up to that point (an additional restriction I put on myself) including the "save the offshoot village way in the north" in the "you're bei
> Also, the melting point of the steel used in the Twin Towers is actually about 400 degrees > HOTTER than the temperature at which jet fuel burns.
What part of "steel softens when it's heated", don't you artards not understand?
Oh, maybe you're talking about this or that "mysterious" puddle of melted steel. Ever have a bonfire? Smoke was coming out of that site for a month after it fell. How do you think blacksmiths heat up stuff? By having a giant fire, in which the center does get far hotter.
> Surprisingly, $93,000/year doesn't buy you a whole lot in full-time support. You've basically hired a > developer and maybe a tester at that point
No, you haven't. Not even close. The real cost of an employee is something on the order of 3x their salary. Benefits, their "share" of infrastructure usage -- electricity, heating, cooling, high-end machine for development, square footage leased or bought, and so on.
So a crappy C student fresh out of Yokel U. would have to work for about $30k a year just to afford a developer. The extra tester is on top of that.
I knew it was vertical resolution, but neglected to consider the wider screen ratio would imply a much larger horizontal resolution. Oops:)
Still, it also depends on how much is jammed into the game. I could run Kingpin when it first came out at 1600x1200 at around that magical 60-70 fps I talked about, and it looked wonderful.
It's transparently obvious that the strike tag is growing in popularity, as it is being added to more and more BBS-type systems online. So it isn't going anywhere.
No, the real reason is some BBSs dislike sarcasm and the like because it pisses off the targets. So we end up on Slashdot using strikethru^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H control-H's, a fine, time-honored tradition that only the kind of people who post on Slashdot would understand, anyway.
Didn't Tony Stark just solve this problem with a soldering gun and some paladium recently?
Lesson to learn: Much of human technical progress is tied to new materials, i.e. materials science. Wood, stone, bronze, iron, steel, stainless steel, titanium, kevlar, nanotubes in a polycarbon resin compound, blah blah blah.
Currently we're paused waiting for that magnificent battery/power source that's relatively light and offers a lot of power. And is cheap and can be refilled/recharged cheaply.
In the abstract world of academia, or even just desktop application development, where all you care about is the algorithm, perhaps.
In the real world, you also have constraints like memory and timing. You can, indeed, make theories and perform experiments to optimize this or that algorithm for the actual hardware and typical data sets you will be using. So it would actually be an "applied science" in some cases.
He should have said software engineering is not programming.
In software engineering, you're creating the software as a whole product (perhaps an app by itself, perhaps part of a larger product like an embedded radio or microwave.) So you have to know how to gather requirements, create designs, review, build, and test. And for non-trivial products, do this with a dozen or more programmers.
Now software engineering, at least when I was in college 20 years ago, was just a class you took getting your CS degree. I don't know if it's its own engineering specialty ala nuclear or chemical engineering (which, similarly, is not the exact same thing as chemistry.)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know about xkcd, but I'm sure The Bible predicts this somewhere, somehow.
It's just as well they canceled it.
Who wants to pull out their favorite BFG, and suddenly sees it takes 6 shots to kill a rat?
I'm just sad we don't get to see Amanda Kimmel again, but in HDTV this time! >:(
Write your Congressman. That's what they're there for, to slap the technocrats around when they're getting too uppity.
78s! Young punks! Back in the day, we didn't have no steenking disc recordings for our music. No, we had good old wax cylinders, the way God and Tom Edison intended!
You cranked the thing with your hand just to make it run! It was impossible to go at a steady pace, so your orchestra playing sweet old Beethoven's 5th sounded like a china cabinet tumbling down stairs, and Carmen sounded like a goat choking on its own scrotum! And we liked it!
Ya cranked it until your sweat dripped on it and then you got your ass beat. Ya went to your room and cried, and when mom and dad went away, you tried to hump the cylinder while thinking about Mary Jane Johnston's wrist, which you saw once when you went over there for milk, and mom and dad would get home early and catch you and you got your ass beat again.
And we liked it!
> Some of us still remember the Great 8-Track Riots of '78. It wasn't pretty.
Really? I thought sideburns, shaggy hair, and girls with tons of eye makeup were kind of back in style nowadays.
> Heh, but that won't happen. Supply and demand will kick in and I think we'll all see
> just how many people there are in the world. I imagine supply will be about 1/2 to 1/4
> what the demand will be, so prices will go up.
Perhaps you are confused as to the nature of a democracy.
It's bad enough an elected Congresscritter will have to ride out "hundreds of thousands of complaints", so they won't, and will push it back yet again.
But trying to tell those who elect you, "Tough! Go out now and buy the overpriced converters or new style TVs, both in short supply at the moment" just isn't going to happen.
And I've got news for you. Techno-nerds vote much less than do old folks or pissed-off folks .
In Dungeon of Doom, an ancient Mac game, if you had high enough strength, you could dual wield 2-handers, with full damage from both.
There were house rules in D&D where you could do this, too.
Yes, it makes a mockery of monks and people dual wielding daggers.
As it should.
And the spartan use of color to offset THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED really scare you into thinking you're doing something wrong, and that somebody's gonna catch you!
Really gets the heart pumping. Well done, Blizzard!
There's several issues here, and none of them would fix the problem in the 2000 election, sorry.
1. Get rid of electors -- Aside from the occasional "faithless" elector, there's still the problem of what happens when, say, the president elect dies before taking office. Would be nice if this were cleared up with the same stroke. But that' won't solve the problem in 2000 since states would still be "winner take all".
2. Demanding the presidency be a nationwide pure popular vote also wouldn't solve the problem as you will have close nationwide elections anyway. And the "winner take all" concept, technically separate from the electors system, has benefits you don't necessarily want to get rid of just because your party got stung at one election over it. It's been to your benefit as much as your detriment, to say nothing of losing the "big mandate" exaggeration the electoral system provides -- a party relying on "big mandates" to get social spending passed could be burned a lot more than helped.
> Things like this can really piss off a gamer, but thankfully are mostly disappearing from
> today's games, as AI programming has advanced enough to not require the use of such.
Oh, you know what I hate? It's what I call "Sim Ant Syndrome"
In Sim Ant, you simulated an entire ant colony, though you could take charge of any ant you wanted in order to move it somewhere, usually to leave a chemical trail to food or a battle.
So far so good. But the enemy ant colony always made a bee line (so to speak) for whatever ant you had posessed, whether you left a chemical trail or not. If you switched ants, the other ants always immediately switched to attack that new ant -- even before you had done anything with it.
Mech Warrior Mercenaries, the best Mech game I've ever played, also suffered from this. You'd go out with your two wingmen and the opposing triad of mechs would always come after you, end of story.
So I put Sim Ant Syndrome to work for me, and got in the little 160 mph zipper robot, and assigned the Atlas D and Atlas K to my wingmen, and ran all over the place while they slowly chewed up the idiots always gunning for me.
Ahhh, the good old Atlas D. There was a point 2/3 through the game where the mechs you "found" started being seriously upgraded from your already-looted stable of mechs, thus making obsolete all the old mechs -- except the monstrous Atlas D, which was so massive it could still stand up to the new mech pounding, and could loadout enough stuff to fight back more than effectively. And the Atlas K, the new mech's Atlas, sheesh.
Within a few levels of the Atlas K, though, the game got to a point where it would crash when I got to a certain spot and I couldn't get around it, even reverting to a fairly ancient saved game. And that was with the final patch ever released. I wonder if anyone ever finished MWM on "hardest".
"Don't hurt me daddy!" setting, with a bonnet and a pacifier in his mouth. Good times...
Once you completed Serious Sam on Serious (which I did, solo), it unlocked "You are not serious" difficulty, which seemed to be about the same except the monsters faded in and out of visibility over a few second cycle.
I've seen games do this before. I think City of Heroes missions are like this.
It won't rescue you from being pounded over and over in a mission that's way over your head, but if you're "almost there", a subsequent attempt can be easier.
For example, typical missions may have spawns of 1 minion and 1 lieutenant, while later retries might use 3 minions and 0 lieutenants, which is mildly easier. Of course, this may also just be a fallout of them treating the two spawn types as roughly equivalent in difficulty.
Or maybe not.
For online games, though, it's hard to find fellow insane partners to tackle the toughest of things when you can just wimp the difficulty or skip it altogether.
They really need a new class of server just for insane people.
Was it the first Real FPS game (forget what it's called) that had a dynamic AI? It would literally learn your techniques (such as you jump out from a corner, shoot, and leap back behind it, repeat.
Well, a few times of that, and the bad guy would shoot a second time, perfectly timed for when you re-leapt out to hit you.
So one minute, you're leaping out, back, out, back, out, monster dead.
The next you leap out, back, out, bam, you're dead.
Brilliant.
I absolutely love setting the highest difficulty as a challenge for games.
One of the most brilliant "hardest" settings was in Thief, where in the hardest setting, you were not allowed to kill anybody. Hence the whole game became a puzzle of sneaking, with no more than blackjacking someone.
Countless times I heard someone talk about how good they got with the sword in Thief, but I always wondered what the point of that was. If I wanted melee action I'd play some other game.
Accomplishments on Hardest, Never Looking Up Solutions Online
Realized this could probably be done with 1 fighter, though I didn't try it. And no, I'm not lying. You didn't think the bards wrote tales about your pathetic adventures, did you?
And some (partial) failures
Why bother with an antimatter bomb when a cobalt bomb, a "continent buster", would be good enough for most war purposes?
> Also, the melting point of the steel used in the Twin Towers is actually about 400 degrees
> HOTTER than the temperature at which jet fuel burns.
What part of "steel softens when it's heated", don't you artards not understand?
Oh, maybe you're talking about this or that "mysterious" puddle of melted steel. Ever have a bonfire? Smoke was coming out of that site for a month after it fell. How do you think blacksmiths heat up stuff? By having a giant fire, in which the center does get far hotter.
> Surprisingly, $93,000/year doesn't buy you a whole lot in full-time support. You've basically hired a
> developer and maybe a tester at that point
No, you haven't. Not even close. The real cost of an employee is something on the order of 3x their salary. Benefits, their "share" of infrastructure usage -- electricity, heating, cooling, high-end machine for development, square footage leased or bought, and so on.
So a crappy C student fresh out of Yokel U. would have to work for about $30k a year just to afford a developer. The extra tester is on top of that.
I had had a 19" monitor that could handle 1600x1200 before EverQuest came out. IIRC, it was about a $500 upgrade, total package about $1500.
You are half-correct.
I knew it was vertical resolution, but neglected to consider the wider screen ratio would imply a much larger horizontal resolution. Oops :)
Still, it also depends on how much is jammed into the game. I could run Kingpin when it first came out at 1600x1200 at around that magical 60-70 fps I talked about, and it looked wonderful.
It's transparently obvious that the strike tag is growing in popularity, as it is being added to more and more BBS-type systems online. So it isn't going anywhere.
No, the real reason is some BBSs dislike sarcasm and the like because it pisses off the targets. So we end up on Slashdot using strikethru^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H control-H's, a fine, time-honored tradition that only the kind of people who post on Slashdot would understand, anyway.
Didn't Tony Stark just solve this problem with a soldering gun and some paladium recently?
Lesson to learn: Much of human technical progress is tied to new materials, i.e. materials science. Wood, stone, bronze, iron, steel, stainless steel, titanium, kevlar, nanotubes in a polycarbon resin compound, blah blah blah.
Currently we're paused waiting for that magnificent battery/power source that's relatively light and offers a lot of power. And is cheap and can be refilled/recharged cheaply.
In the abstract world of academia, or even just desktop application development, where all you care about is the algorithm, perhaps.
In the real world, you also have constraints like memory and timing. You can, indeed, make theories and perform experiments to optimize this or that algorithm for the actual hardware and typical data sets you will be using. So it would actually be an "applied science" in some cases.
Correct.
He should have said software engineering is not programming .
In software engineering, you're creating the software as a whole product (perhaps an app by itself, perhaps part of a larger product like an embedded radio or microwave.) So you have to know how to gather requirements, create designs, review, build, and test. And for non-trivial products, do this with a dozen or more programmers.
Now software engineering, at least when I was in college 20 years ago, was just a class you took getting your CS degree. I don't know if it's its own engineering specialty ala nuclear or chemical engineering (which, similarly, is not the exact same thing as chemistry.)
You already have fatty molecule overlords.
Human intelligence, culture, history, knowledge, and ethics are all transcendent offshoots supporting molecular reproduction.