- Ultima V This was a game with depth, with true player freedom, and with a perfect sense of there being something cool always around the next corner.
- Out of this World From the very first scene in this all-assembler gem, the atmosphere was the focus. The game mechanics, graphics, sound, were all good, but the integration and eerie presence was superb.
- Star Control II An open universe, moddable ship, super fun arcade combat, and the best writing, hands down, of any game I've ever played.
- Wing Commander This really needs no explanation.
- Dungeon Master Diablo, 10 years early. The spells, the graphics, the world. It was just plain fun.
You know, I'm generally against tenure, because, well, it lets lousy teachers stick around long after their sell-by date. But this is exactly what it's for. Screw this guy and the nutjobs who are sponsoring him, once you have tenure, there's jack-all people can do to you. Which (in this case) is as it should be.
Great, let's join something I love (Pixar) and something I admire (Apple) with something I despise (10 points for guessing that's Disney).
Pixar has done the unbelievable and released *only* great movies. They are the heir of the old, beloved, plowed-into-a-wall-and-burned-to-the-ground Disney animation studios.
Much as I'd love to see Disney stop sucking so hard, I'd rather they just *die* than take down Pixar with them.
Good thing I'm on the boards of both companies, so my opinion on this matter will be influential... or something.
So I took a course back in the day that was meant as a way of convincing promising students to pursue a career in Chemistry. Instead of the usual boring intro to Chem class, this one had us performing MRIs on unknown chemicals, learning the basics of quantum theory... the works. Very, very interesting. And incidentally, bizarrely difficult.
So, around comes finals time. We file in, grab our little blue books and about 40 pages of exam, and we're off and running. The first half of the test is your standard questions covering concepts and material from the class. I'm doing ok, feeling pretty good about myself. Furious scribbling is going on around me as we all work through the exam.
Next comes the second half of the exam. In this section (the page explains), a newly discovered chemical will be presented, and we're expected to use our knowledge of chemistry to figure out how it behaves, etc. This sounds very tricky. With some trepidation, I turn the page to discover what this molecule is.
And break up laughing. Snorting, really. People turn to look at me, wondering if I'm cracking under the pressure. I laugh some more to myself, fill out the rest of the exam book in record time, and head out whistling, the first student to do so, 45 minutes before the end of the exam.
Why did I laugh, you wonder? A little back story is in order. For three summers before going off to college, I had been working as a research assistant at what was then Bell Labs, working in organic chemistry. The molecule we were given to explain was none other than Buckminsterfullerene, the subject of my lab's study.
What would you expect it to look like in solution? Well, a nice deep purple is how I remember it.
How would you go about separating it out of the carbon soot it forms in? Here, let me draw you a diagram of our extraction system...
How do you think it would behave when doped with alkali metals? How about I quote from the paper I coauthored?
Luckiest damn thing that has ever happened to me. I felt a little guilty of course, but not so much that I made a big deal about it. It's not my fault that when I cited my research by name, the grader assumed it was my dad.;-)
I will gladly jump ship from Adobe for the first roughly comparable product that lets me set my own fscking keybindings! God, I can't stand Adobe's egotism.
Please. Stopping the construction of fabulous new projects because they could be terrorist targets is defeatist at best.
Besides, the very first use of the very first skyhook should be to build the *second* one. It only gets easier the more we do it, and boy, does taking an elevator beat strapping an explosion to your butt.
What joy and terror there has been in the prequels (haven't seen Sith yet... drat!) has come from knowing the future. I got chills when the clone armies were loading up (in their soon-to-be-stormtrooper outfits) for war (aboard proto-star-destroyers no less!) with all the good guys looking on. It is very powerful, precisely because you KNOW the bad stuff is coming. And there they were, watching it happen! Ack!
Knowing the outcome of Hamlet doesn't make it any less tragic or effective. I think the prequels have a great story to tell.
To think that a person that believes in ID or creationism is incapable of understanding basic scientific philosophy or even incapable of being true scientists themselves is ignorant and offensive.
Sorry, but that's contradicted by every word out of the ID movement's mouths. A man may be a great scientist, but in taking up ID as a cause, he turns his back on a rigorous intellectual tradition and replaces it with desire and self-delusion. There's nothing saying that a belief in ID is a priori an indicator of lack of intelligence generally, but it is a lack of rigorous thinking with regards to science vs. belief.
Being dismissed as a lunatic for raging against mainstream science has plauged true scientists for centuries.
True, but in this case, ID proponents are raging against science itself, rather than a particular idea, and are advancing beliefs, rather than falsifiable hypotheses, in its place. I'm glad you believe in an all-powerful deity, but such belief does not make you a plucky outsider fighting conventional scientific dogma.
After all, for every maverick scientist who's bucked the conventional wisdom and been branded a lunatic, there are thousands of actual lunatics.
There are indeed great similarities between open source and communism/marxism. Both involve collective action for the benefit of all.
The interesting thing to me is how communism-as-economic-system differs from open-source-as-software-development-process.
Basically, it seems to me that what makes open source development work is the zero marginal cost of code copies. Basically, we have your garden variety despots running most open source projects (Hi Linus!). Why don't we run into the same problems economic collectivism seems to devolve into?
In communist economies, the despots inevitably use their control of the collective development results to extort more and more power and wealth, eventually bringing collapse. What makes open source work is, should Linus decide he needs a shiny new beemer or whatnot, and demand $10 per copy of Linux used, the world shrugs, grabs a copy of the source, and elects a new despot. There's upheaval but no long term damage.
I think we'll find that open source models work great where anyone can push the project forward, and no one can hold it hostage, but whenever zero-sum effects come into play, it will fail to work as hoped.
It's deadly dull. Go into skirmish mode, buy a fleet, and pow, right into battle you go. And I mean RIGHT in. You start off right next to the enemy AI. Which is fine if you're playing a short-ranged incapacitate/destruction strategy. But what if you want to stand off and use long range weapons? Have to run away first I guess.
And killing an enemy ship? A freaking epic achievement. But the good news is, your ships never die either. Woo. Hoo.
All in all, I bought, installed, and played this one for about 5 hours. The last 3 hours were spent mainly looking for a reason to keep playing. And not finding it.
What is a concern is if they're leaving because they're being driven out by sexist attitudes or working conditions (not deliberately sexist perhaps, but more likely designed by single men, for single men and with a "you have to change your life, because we're not changing our conditions" attitude). If this is the case then a) that shows a deep ingrained prejedice that belongs in the 50's rather then a 21st century cutting edge industry, and b) we're losing lots of very talented people who can bring whole new ideas and ways of looking at problems into the industry because they were born with a particular set of physical characteristics rather then for any worthwhile reason.
And I call bullshit. There is nothing sexist in jobs existing that are better suited to some people than others. It's sexist if the job is *designed* that way, sure, but let's look at IT work for a sec.
- Work 12+ hours of the day
- Carry a pager when you're not working
- Deal with minute details and irritating incompatibilities all day long
- Spend your life alone in a server closet talking to the blinkenlights
Basically, this is your average obsessive single guy job. But that's the *nature* of IT. It's not sexist, and there's nothing wrong with saying "you have to change your life" to take this job, that's what jobs ARE. You can't be a forest ranger and hate the outdoors, and you most likely won't like IT work unless you get off on talking more to computers than you do to real human beings. And not having much social life.
Well, if I were an Iraqi national going to the polls, I'm pretty certain that having one of these things patrolling around the voting booths instead of a couple of marines would be very welcome.
Why? In the type of war we're fighting in Iraq, marines are just one more target for a terror-bomb. By contrast, how fired up do you think some suicide-bomber candidate is going to get when told to "eradicate the infidel's Aibos! No robots will withstand our wrath!" Much harder sell, seems to me.
Another aspect is that, unlike on-the-spot humans, the guy controlling this sucker is off in a bunker somewhere. So when bullets start flying, less adrenaline comes into play. Perhaps this will make for more measured responses than firing at anything that moves, which would be a pretty natural response when coming under fire.
I hear what you're saying about the video-game aspect. It does seem like shooting someone should require more interaction with your victim. But I don't think it's all negatives.
You know, I hear this a lot when discussing manned flight. "What if the explorers like Magellan or Vasco da Game had thought about [flaming death] like that?" And in one sense it's true; exploration has its costs and risks, inherent to the concept.
But don't you think that if it had been possible, Magellan's royal backers would have preferred an advanced clockwork dinghy (work with me here) that cost 1/10th the cost, could disappear without any loss of life, and which brought back much of the same information? At least at first?
Of course they would have.
I love spaceflight, I dream of colonizing the system and the stars, but until we hit the point of diminishing returns on robotic research, or until technology catches up to our dreams, robotic exploration just makes better sense.
Now before you jump on this and say "Until we go up and try, we'll never learn," remember that there are *thousands* of crucial technologies, from earth-lift vehicles to deep space propulsion systems to hardened computer systems that *can* be refined, all without a single human life risked.
Um. Factually incorrect. Not sure why you think we don't know what historic CO2 levels are, but you might want to check out:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_P la nning/New_Data/index.html
which is has a graph of findings from Antarctic ice cores, whose trapped bubbles of gas nicely record CO2 levels back some 500k years. Note the big red spike at the end of the graph, way above previous highs. On a following page:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_P la nning/Closer_Look/
You can see that in the last 200 years, CO2 levels have shot up 25%.
Just because this issue gets mainstream press (read: hysteric and unreliable) coverage, doesn't make the issue go away.
Friend of mine works for these guys, and their product kicks ass. Haven't yet tried the NASA version to compare, but check out http://www.keyhole.com/ for a great (for fee) whole earth viewer.
I think it's $40/yr subscription, 7-day free trial or somesuch for the basic version. Very, very fun toy.
...what a space elevator is, how it would work, and so forth, but really doesn't, check out this link.
This is the NASA-sponsored report that basically declared it open season on space elevators. It's fascinating, in-depth, and answers questions such as "how do we build it" and "what happens when in falls/gets holes in it".
A must-read for space buffs.
My wife and I were discussing a different take on this concept a couple of days ago, and came to agree that this kind of thing is a *bad idea*.
Our conversation was about health care premium reductions for opting out of "maternity" services. But I think the same arguments apply here. Basically, this kind of system defeats the core purpose of insurance; namely, to share risk.
There are times when charging more for a given behavior makes sense (eg quitting smoking) and times when it doesn't (eg driving in safer neighborhoods). Basically, given that people for the most part can't choose where they drive, this amounts to a violation of the risk sharing priciple. It doesn't drive down overall premiums, simply shifts those premiums to an unlucky subset, while getting others a break the didn't earn.
And of course, the system is designed to encourage safer driving, but we already have that in the form of accident reports and moving violations, which bring up your premium dramatically when you commit them.
I don't want to see a system where the rich folks get lower premiums due to driving in suburbs, while urban drivers get nailed. It leads to that insurer ending up with safer drivers overall (as the higher premiums for those in Compton drive them out of the insurance pool). In fact, in most cases such preferential insuring is actually illegal.
You can't accept only low-risk drivers as an insurer, because doing so breaks the risk-sharing concept that underlies the whole system.
I've been wondering why they haven't taken down the code from their servers. It just occurred to me that they may not have anyone in their company left who knows *how* to.
Slashdot Mirror
- Ultima V
This was a game with depth, with true player freedom, and with a perfect sense of there being something cool always around the next corner.
- Out of this World
From the very first scene in this all-assembler gem, the atmosphere was the focus. The game mechanics, graphics, sound, were all good, but the integration and eerie presence was superb.
- Star Control II
An open universe, moddable ship, super fun arcade combat, and the best writing, hands down, of any game I've ever played.
- Wing Commander
This really needs no explanation.
- Dungeon Master
Diablo, 10 years early. The spells, the graphics, the world. It was just plain fun.
GOD did I love those games.
You know, I'm generally against tenure, because, well, it lets lousy teachers stick around long after their sell-by date. But this is exactly what it's for. Screw this guy and the nutjobs who are sponsoring him, once you have tenure, there's jack-all people can do to you. Which (in this case) is as it should be.
Great, let's join something I love (Pixar) and something I admire (Apple) with something I despise (10 points for guessing that's Disney).
Pixar has done the unbelievable and released *only* great movies. They are the heir of the old, beloved, plowed-into-a-wall-and-burned-to-the-ground Disney animation studios.
Much as I'd love to see Disney stop sucking so hard, I'd rather they just *die* than take down Pixar with them.
Good thing I'm on the boards of both companies, so my opinion on this matter will be influential... or something.
So I took a course back in the day that was meant as a way of convincing promising students to pursue a career in Chemistry. Instead of the usual boring intro to Chem class, this one had us performing MRIs on unknown chemicals, learning the basics of quantum theory... the works. Very, very interesting. And incidentally, bizarrely difficult.
;-)
So, around comes finals time. We file in, grab our little blue books and about 40 pages of exam, and we're off and running. The first half of the test is your standard questions covering concepts and material from the class. I'm doing ok, feeling pretty good about myself. Furious scribbling is going on around me as we all work through the exam.
Next comes the second half of the exam. In this section (the page explains), a newly discovered chemical will be presented, and we're expected to use our knowledge of chemistry to figure out how it behaves, etc. This sounds very tricky. With some trepidation, I turn the page to discover what this molecule is.
And break up laughing. Snorting, really. People turn to look at me, wondering if I'm cracking under the pressure. I laugh some more to myself, fill out the rest of the exam book in record time, and head out whistling, the first student to do so, 45 minutes before the end of the exam.
Why did I laugh, you wonder? A little back story is in order. For three summers before going off to college, I had been working as a research assistant at what was then Bell Labs, working in organic chemistry. The molecule we were given to explain was none other than Buckminsterfullerene, the subject of my lab's study.
What would you expect it to look like in solution? Well, a nice deep purple is how I remember it.
How would you go about separating it out of the carbon soot it forms in? Here, let me draw you a diagram of our extraction system...
How do you think it would behave when doped with alkali metals? How about I quote from the paper I coauthored?
Luckiest damn thing that has ever happened to me. I felt a little guilty of course, but not so much that I made a big deal about it. It's not my fault that when I cited my research by name, the grader assumed it was my dad.
1) Create incredibly popular legal download service
2) Load gun
3) Aim at foot
4) Pull trigger
5) Profit!
I will gladly jump ship from Adobe for the first roughly comparable product that lets me set my own fscking keybindings! God, I can't stand Adobe's egotism.
Please. Stopping the construction of fabulous new projects because they could be terrorist targets is defeatist at best.
Besides, the very first use of the very first skyhook should be to build the *second* one. It only gets easier the more we do it, and boy, does taking an elevator beat strapping an explosion to your butt.
Here's to audacity and dreaming big dreams.
They missed a great chance with ginormous. I think this is much better:
gynormous (adj): Carting around a whole lot of junk in the trunk while female. An extra helping of woman.
"Yeah, she's cute, but the chick she's with is gynormous!"
What joy and terror there has been in the prequels (haven't seen Sith yet... drat!) has come from knowing the future. I got chills when the clone armies were loading up (in their soon-to-be-stormtrooper outfits) for war (aboard proto-star-destroyers no less!) with all the good guys looking on. It is very powerful, precisely because you KNOW the bad stuff is coming. And there they were, watching it happen! Ack!
Knowing the outcome of Hamlet doesn't make it any less tragic or effective. I think the prequels have a great story to tell.
YMMV, of course.
To think that a person that believes in ID or creationism is incapable of understanding basic scientific philosophy or even incapable of being true scientists themselves is ignorant and offensive.
Sorry, but that's contradicted by every word out of the ID movement's mouths. A man may be a great scientist, but in taking up ID as a cause, he turns his back on a rigorous intellectual tradition and replaces it with desire and self-delusion. There's nothing saying that a belief in ID is a priori an indicator of lack of intelligence generally, but it is a lack of rigorous thinking with regards to science vs. belief.
Being dismissed as a lunatic for raging against mainstream science has plauged true scientists for centuries.
True, but in this case, ID proponents are raging against science itself, rather than a particular idea, and are advancing beliefs, rather than falsifiable hypotheses, in its place. I'm glad you believe in an all-powerful deity, but such belief does not make you a plucky outsider fighting conventional scientific dogma.
After all, for every maverick scientist who's bucked the conventional wisdom and been branded a lunatic, there are thousands of actual lunatics.
There are indeed great similarities between open source and communism/marxism. Both involve collective action for the benefit of all.
The interesting thing to me is how communism-as-economic-system differs from open-source-as-software-development-process.
Basically, it seems to me that what makes open source development work is the zero marginal cost of code copies. Basically, we have your garden variety despots running most open source projects (Hi Linus!). Why don't we run into the same problems economic collectivism seems to devolve into?
In communist economies, the despots inevitably use their control of the collective development results to extort more and more power and wealth, eventually bringing collapse. What makes open source work is, should Linus decide he needs a shiny new beemer or whatnot, and demand $10 per copy of Linux used, the world shrugs, grabs a copy of the source, and elects a new despot. There's upheaval but no long term damage.
I think we'll find that open source models work great where anyone can push the project forward, and no one can hold it hostage, but whenever zero-sum effects come into play, it will fail to work as hoped.
It's deadly dull. Go into skirmish mode, buy a fleet, and pow, right into battle you go. And I mean RIGHT in. You start off right next to the enemy AI. Which is fine if you're playing a short-ranged incapacitate/destruction strategy. But what if you want to stand off and use long range weapons? Have to run away first I guess.
And killing an enemy ship? A freaking epic achievement. But the good news is, your ships never die either. Woo. Hoo.
All in all, I bought, installed, and played this one for about 5 hours. The last 3 hours were spent mainly looking for a reason to keep playing. And not finding it.
Windowdressing: 9/10
Gameplay: 2/10
- Work 12+ hours of the day
- Carry a pager when you're not working
- Deal with minute details and irritating incompatibilities all day long
- Spend your life alone in a server closet talking to the blinkenlights
Basically, this is your average obsessive single guy job. But that's the *nature* of IT. It's not sexist, and there's nothing wrong with saying "you have to change your life" to take this job, that's what jobs ARE. You can't be a forest ranger and hate the outdoors, and you most likely won't like IT work unless you get off on talking more to computers than you do to real human beings. And not having much social life.
Nuts. :-)
I love it. As perfect a description of a slashdotting as I've ever seen.
Do you want to play a game?
Well, if I were an Iraqi national going to the polls, I'm pretty certain that having one of these things patrolling around the voting booths instead of a couple of marines would be very welcome.
Why? In the type of war we're fighting in Iraq, marines are just one more target for a terror-bomb. By contrast, how fired up do you think some suicide-bomber candidate is going to get when told to "eradicate the infidel's Aibos! No robots will withstand our wrath!" Much harder sell, seems to me.
Another aspect is that, unlike on-the-spot humans, the guy controlling this sucker is off in a bunker somewhere. So when bullets start flying, less adrenaline comes into play. Perhaps this will make for more measured responses than firing at anything that moves, which would be a pretty natural response when coming under fire.
I hear what you're saying about the video-game aspect. It does seem like shooting someone should require more interaction with your victim. But I don't think it's all negatives.
You know, I hear this a lot when discussing manned flight. "What if the explorers like Magellan or Vasco da Game had thought about [flaming death] like that?" And in one sense it's true; exploration has its costs and risks, inherent to the concept.
But don't you think that if it had been possible, Magellan's royal backers would have preferred an advanced clockwork dinghy (work with me here) that cost 1/10th the cost, could disappear without any loss of life, and which brought back much of the same information? At least at first?
Of course they would have.
I love spaceflight, I dream of colonizing the system and the stars, but until we hit the point of diminishing returns on robotic research, or until technology catches up to our dreams, robotic exploration just makes better sense.
Now before you jump on this and say "Until we go up and try, we'll never learn," remember that there are *thousands* of crucial technologies, from earth-lift vehicles to deep space propulsion systems to hardened computer systems that *can* be refined, all without a single human life risked.
Just my 0.02 USD
Um. Factually incorrect. Not sure why you think we don't know what historic CO2 levels are, but you might want to check out:
P la nning/New_Data/index.html
P la nning/Closer_Look/
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_
which is has a graph of findings from Antarctic ice cores, whose trapped bubbles of gas nicely record CO2 levels back some 500k years. Note the big red spike at the end of the graph, way above previous highs. On a following page:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_
You can see that in the last 200 years, CO2 levels have shot up 25%.
Just because this issue gets mainstream press (read: hysteric and unreliable) coverage, doesn't make the issue go away.
Friend of mine works for these guys, and their product kicks ass. Haven't yet tried the NASA version to compare, but check out http://www.keyhole.com/ for a great (for fee) whole earth viewer.
I think it's $40/yr subscription, 7-day free trial or somesuch for the basic version. Very, very fun toy.
Cheers!
Where's the moderation option for "Smug Bastard (-1)"? :-)
...what a space elevator is, how it would work, and so forth, but really doesn't, check out this link. This is the NASA-sponsored report that basically declared it open season on space elevators. It's fascinating, in-depth, and answers questions such as "how do we build it" and "what happens when in falls/gets holes in it". A must-read for space buffs.
... our vaporware overlords!
No f'n way this is legit.
And naturally, I didn't RTFA until after posting. Thanks for the well-deserved correction. :-)
My wife and I were discussing a different take on this concept a couple of days ago, and came to agree that this kind of thing is a *bad idea*.
Our conversation was about health care premium reductions for opting out of "maternity" services. But I think the same arguments apply here. Basically, this kind of system defeats the core purpose of insurance; namely, to share risk.
There are times when charging more for a given behavior makes sense (eg quitting smoking) and times when it doesn't (eg driving in safer neighborhoods). Basically, given that people for the most part can't choose where they drive, this amounts to a violation of the risk sharing priciple. It doesn't drive down overall premiums, simply shifts those premiums to an unlucky subset, while getting others a break the didn't earn.
And of course, the system is designed to encourage safer driving, but we already have that in the form of accident reports and moving violations, which bring up your premium dramatically when you commit them.
I don't want to see a system where the rich folks get lower premiums due to driving in suburbs, while urban drivers get nailed. It leads to that insurer ending up with safer drivers overall (as the higher premiums for those in Compton drive them out of the insurance pool). In fact, in most cases such preferential insuring is actually illegal.
You can't accept only low-risk drivers as an insurer, because doing so breaks the risk-sharing concept that underlies the whole system.
I've been wondering why they haven't taken down the code from their servers. It just occurred to me that they may not have anyone in their company left who knows *how* to.