We should discuss the rise of the Inidian software industry some more.
Where did it come from?
1) Indians realized that to improve their lot in the world, they needed to get educated. Good for them.
2) In the US, writing software was a cool thing for about 30 seconds at the peak of the dot com era. Until then, we went through a period were hiring immigrants/H1-B was pretty much needed to fill the seats with quality people. Yes, we may have got a couple more than we needed, but I think with zero H1-Bs, the software expansion of the late 80s and 90s wouldn't have had the bodies it needed to happen.
3) US programmers fucked up. Remember the Y2K bug? Suddenly, lots of boring programming needed to get done that nobody wanted to do. There already weren't enough programmers on the market to make employers happy. So they looked around, and bam, Indians set up some software companies to do this task. They earned credibility for doing that job well as well as funding to build themselves up.
4) The next time a project came up that a company didn't have the staff for, they knew they could depend on thier Indian partners. The rest is history.
So I guess Indian software companies grew out of natural trade. After a pinch where demand rises and we're forced to import. Is it your stand that we should cut off imports from abroad and decimate the fledgling industries we created overseas in order to keep them from competing with us? Yikes! I thought Republicans were cruel.
This was like a treatise in how to make an inefficient global economy that malfunctions everywhere you look.
India has a lot of talented software writers? They should write software for Indians. I guess they'll have to start by writing their own operating system from scratch. They could have a domestic operating system market instead of importing Windows or Linux from the rest of the world. I guess there's no need for them to import that. And I'm sure the generally poor population of India has a ton of software it needs written.
No. While your argument might concievably work for textiles, steel or cars (I don't believe it does) it is totally bogus in a knowledge driven community. How does natural trade work when there aren't any natural resources?
Ug. I just don't have the energy for this one. A couple tidbits though. Liberalization of the economy plus absurd rate of manufacturing has not impoverished China. They're economy is growing fast, faster than the government wants it to, fast enough that they may well kick off a spurt of global inflation. Out of this, some Chinese have become richer yes. Yes some peasants have moved to the cities and stayed poor. But the interesting phenomenon is the rise of Chinese middle class. This is not only making China want of the great potential markets to sell our goods to in the next decade (witness cars) but has also forced a shift by the regime there politcally. They've enshrined personal property in the Constitution - Mao is rolling in his grave. Will China be able to cut off supply of all it manufacters leaving the world screwed? Only if it wants to impoverish its new middle class. Even then, there is already a trend developing where China is losing manufacturing to cheaper parts of SE Asia.
This is also a great tradgedy in NAFTA. Mexico failed to play the global economy well. It got tons of manufacturing from NAFTA. It failed to leverage that into a stronger middle class and more modern, efficient factories. It's penalty? It's now losing many of those manufacturing jobs to even cheaper competitors.
Does this all benifit Americans? Yes and No. No, we are losing manufacturing jobs. No, we are now forced to compete in a global market for knowledge driven jobs as well. However, unless we strive to prevent the rise of manufacturing and knowledge work overseas, this is the reality of the world. We can either particpate or not. We know what it looks like if we participate, let's consider what it looks like if we don't.
I know I'm not going to understand the manufacture of whatever example I give well enough, but you'll get the gist.
Let's say Americans produce our own CD players. Other countries can produce CD players as well, just cheaper. So any country following natural trade will build the CD player if they can, or import it if they can't. We don't produce them the cheapest, so our exports will be in the neighborhood of zero. Labor costs will be higher, and perhaps the importing of the needed resources will be more expensive than our "competitors." However, with a lock on the US economy, the producer will stay in business. It will just cost the US consumer far more money to buy a CD player. Maybe $25 bucks instead of the $13 dollar one I saw at Target yesterday. So we get a couple of jobs and pay more for our CD players.
There's the crux. We lose the ability to export. We also lose a good chunk of the foriegn investment our economy depends on. As an added bonus we now have to pay more for the goods we buy. All this to protect industries that we are bad at. We'll form a shell around the country where we wind up exporting very little - others will reciprocate when we close down trade. The other economic powers will continue to benifit from free trade. Meanwhile, it will get worse. Do you think Nike is coming back? No. They'd go out of business if they did or perhaps become second rate. I guess they might have a near monopoly in the US if they did come back under your system though - interesting how that co
If you look at the context, I was answering his aside where he asked who was worse off between an unemployed American and an employed third worlder who was working in dangerous conditions to do the American's job. While it strikes me now that he might have been having real sympathy for the guy over there, I was pointing out that working in those conditions is far superior to the alternative.
As to your attack of would I be happy to be laid off due to off-shoring? Hell no. When faced with the options of taking a free-market position where I believe those jobs will come back to the US in some form or another or one where I think we need to shut doors and stop the bleeding, I have to keep the big view in mind.
Indians working jobs in my industry presents a major risk to me. The US IT market will lose global market share and might lose net jobs. At the same time, protectionism has risks. Some of that risk is that it keeps other countries in the Third World longer and slows the advent of markets for my company to sell its products into and for other American companies to do the same.
Right now, I'm living with the fear that my career choice might be a doomed one. I'm working to improve my skills in hopes that I'm able to keep my head above water. That and I'm trusting that the free market will work out.
The position I'm laying out is one which I believe has my best interest in mind. However, I counter those who try to put forth Humanitarian arguements that say that trade hurts the poor people overseas with what I believe are superior humanitarian arguements.
I'm forgetting the map name. But it had a square base with the vulnerable to the open air in the center. I would start matches with an odd technique: Suit up in medium armor with energy and hop a Shrike. Come in from the side, let the shrike bounce along the back of the base, swipe the flag and get out. Usually in the begining, people got the turrets up quick enough that light armor was still at risk of getting pinged to death, but a medium could survive quite easily. Plus, everyone was so busy setting up, that you could actually make it back to the shrike as often as not.
Ok which is worse - A US worker losses his job, goes on unemployment and has to depend on his wife's inadaquate job to try to make ends meet. Perhaps now he can't send his kids to college. They either pay their own way or get a job.
Or B, the US worker keeps his job and is happy. Meanwhile, instead of having a job at below the ->US- minimum wage building cars, a man in the third world has to depend on his children and wife working or begging in order to avoid going hungry. His children don't recieve an education to speak of, let alone thinking of college. Without an education, his children will never be "middle class".
Indian and Chinese programmers or auto workers who make far far less money than their US counter-parts are part of a growing middle class in their socities. Other factory workers have made the move from desperately poor to merely poor. A reason their salaries can be so low is that the rest of the labor in their countries is so cheap that they can live quite well on a relatively small amount of money - I'm thinking programmers here not textile workers.
Ah, but you saw that there is still rampant child labor that is offensive. 10 year-old girls working 12 hour days instead of going to school. Is that ideal? No. Is it better than them being sold in slavery / prostituation at the age of 13? You bet.
Is the US going to have a huge amount of competition in nearly every industry? Yes we are. We're disadvanteged because we're so rich that it costs a lot to pay an American to do something. We've got the advantage in that a huge percentage of our people are college educated and we have a very very extensive university system that attracts some of the best minds from across the world. That our labor practices are barbaric by European standards gives us an advatage over them as capital spent here is at less risk. It helps to be able to fire people and ask them to work long days in a pinch.
I agree that a vibrant middle class is the key to success. I'm also nervous that offshoring competition creates a race to the bottom in labor standards. At the same time, Europe has been able to survive competition with the US for quite some time - albiet with 10% unemployment. If the US continues to work its ass off it'll be fine. But we'll need continued government investment in the right places to make that happen.
It's really all about pace for me and actual thinking. Most of the time, UT2K4 and the like are played a truly frenetic pace. From time to time, a handful of players will be standing still sniping or moving only a little while babysitting an objective or flag. While you are moving in UT2K4, you are moving fast and it's intense. UT2K4 is never peaceful, nor are there generally large strategic decisions.
Tribes (I played 2) can be peaceful. There are those wide open areas that you can navigate very quickly with light armor and skill but otherwise are slow to traverse on foot. You can also contribute to your team while remaining almost ignorant of combat going on around you and certaintly not firing a gun. To do this, you run around deploying sensors, or turrets or what have you or carry a repair gun to glue stuff back together. (Yes, link gun in 2K4 does this, but it feels like kludge)
It also makes a big differance that there are vehicles in capture the flag. And they work in that environment. One of the more beautiful team efforts you'll see in Tribes is one player grabbing the flag and begining to run home. Another player on his team will be flying a Shrike (a small hover plane) and will fly past the flag carrier and park the plan in his path. Guy #2 jumps out, the flag carrier jumps in and starts flying home.
There are just so many interesting tactical / strategic things to do in Tribes that aren't there in UT2K4. That's the selling point. I'll share two favorites.
You have becons. Usually you use them to let your team know where you've put something useful. They can also be put in target mode. All your teamates guns will see a dot which lets them know where to fire to hit your becon. Sounds a little useless until you put one on the underside of an enemy's defensive turret or vehicle station. Suddenly your teamates are lobbing mortars from halfway across the map with pinpoint accuracy to destroy things. Funny as hell.
The other is on a map that is normally dominated by snipers. There is a huge open area between the two relatively close flags that can be picked off. On the edges of these are a series of canyons. You can be daring and load up heavy (slow) armor and walk the canyons mortar in hand. If you manage to sneak up properly from behind. The map is hilariously set up so that well shot mortars are trapped and held in a small room that contains the enemy reequiping stations. Killing a stack of people and trashing those stations that way is hilarious.
Finally, in Tribes, when the action heats up and its a clutch moment, your adreniline does kick up. The cool thing about UT2K4 is that you're almost always at that level of intesity. Mostly because of that small field of view.
Frankly, while the vehicles in UT are very cool and the new mode is fun, I just don't think it's right. UT feels too high paced to have tank battles. I really feel that while the new modes are great, UT is at its finest when there aren't vehicles, when it's played on smallish maps between two fairly small teams. UT's indoor maps tend to be very very good, while the outdoor ones feel bland and average. Tribes had the opposite problem. Their interiors were pretty lame compared to the vast expenses between bases.
So why look at Tribes? Because you want a gaming experience that is more interesting, if slower paced. Why ignore Tribes? The learning curve is a bitch and it takes forever to finally get your first spinfusor kill.
Frankly, I'd much rather a green LED than a blue one that has a piece of tape over it. That's not nearly as slick. You're also proving his point that the blue ones are visually distracting and too damn bright. They make the end user take steps to address the intrusiveness. That's a problem.
One solution is in fact to wipe everything out. The mud I used to play did this every couple of years. There were other approaches in place as well, such as progressively slower levelling and pretty much requiring groups to work together to level. It helps, but isn't perfect. More importantly is developing a culture within the game where having the best ___ isn't the most important thing to most of the players. Encouraging people to do creative and interesting things was key. People don't want to be the best, they want to be important. In a game that isn't very interesting, be it gameplay or culturally, the only way to be important is to be super-high level, or really ugly or rich. If a game has more ways to express yourself, there will be more ways to be important. That and MUDs often have the advantage of having a smaller player base than something like EQ. It's easier to stand out among fewer people.
It isn't unstoppable - I'm sure it can be prevented. I suspect the problem is with bad parenting or schooling. We should form a commission to find out!
Disclaimer: I don't know how to make this idea workable.
Instead of only paying for the channels I want, I want to only pay for the TV I watch. Essentially make everything pay-per-view. HBO would be more expensive than Comedy Central than broadcast. Now if only there was a good way to decide whether the TV was on or not at a given time. Everything comes to my house and I decide whether to watch it or not based on today's programming.
While I tend to agree that the government should recognize same sex couples as families, I think you go too far when saying, "The notion that giving somebody else the same rights you have is somehow weakening yours is stupid and craven."
Look at an example like giving women the right to vote (something I support). When this is done, my manly vote is only half as potent as it once was. If gay people get tax breaks given to straight couples, either the government loses revenue or taxes need to go up. If they are able to adopt children the already long waiting periods to adopt will increase. There consequences of giving gay couples the right to marry or form unions might not be huge for us straight people, but they do exist.
So no, giving my rights to somebody else won't weaken my rights. But they will make the benifits less advantagous. That said, I don't think what I just discussed is what most people who are against gay marriage are really concerned with.
I was under the impression that that was already regulated under the catagory of sexual. NBC would get fined to no end if the started airing porn at 7:00 instead of Friends.
Go straight to your manager and let him know that your ability to do your job is being impacted by the current policies. Be prepared to talk over the options you have for doing your job now that the policy is in place. One of those is to push for an exception. Others might include the company buying you a cell phone that is clearly just for company purposes - a pager could be appropriate as well. You know the situation better than me, think of them.
Be prepared to answer the question from your manager that asks if your current set-up makes sense. What happens if you get a better offer, and leave the company? Is there a good way for somebody else who doesn't have a cell phone to be notified? Should there be a central clearinghouse for these alerts other than your cell phone?
If you and your manager agree that sending messages to your cell phone is the way to go, gettnig an exception is more likely to happen with your direct manager's help. Should you get that exception, document it. You wouldn't want the next round of layoffs to be easy for them.
Forgive me, but I don't think this is a huge deal. Someone made a policy whose intent was to keep people from using their cell phones at work for personal reason, so that meetings would go smoother and folks would be more productive. They didn't know or think that cell phones were being used for work activities. It's not in the interest of anyone at the company to make your life more difficult.
On the broader question of employee owned tech, I think that the main reason companies are and should be cautious is that when you leave, you're going to take your tech with you. Anything they've paid you to set up and that uses your tech suddenly breaks. That sucks. Which comes back to the problem of what happens when you leave and the notices are going to your phone. I really think the answer is that they back off the no cell phones and move it to no personal cell phones. Those of you who need cell phones are then given corporate cell phones. That way, when you leave they give the phone to your fill-in / replacement and the system still works.
Then again, if the phone the message is being sent to can be universally changed by filling out one web form, it becomes dispensible and they just need to hire somebody with a cell phone.
There was a section where you can take an Asimov IQ test. So there's at least some nods being given. I never did read I, Robot, but I do hope they stay somewhat true to flavor. At least now more than just geeks will know the three laws of robotics - and that can't be a bad thing.
I think the key difference is that the XBox has a hardrive. Those HD are pretty useful relative to being limited to flash and burned media for storage.
I always hated level restricted areas. It just didn't feel right. What we did instead was make a rule that if high level players were *responsible* for the deaths of lowbies, they would be punished. That included direct player killing which we tried to make impossible with hardcoding, but also dragging high level aggressive mobs into areas with lowbies and casting the blazing death clouds.
Look at the nominees for best actor and actress as well as the supporting roles. Sure there were quite a few "A" list people there, but there were those who just aren't. Looking at the women, we saw a nominee for a 13 year old's first film, an Iranian actress etc. Even Theron was the kind of actress who would hdardly be considered for a nomination until she put forth a great performance this year.
In LOTR you had a collection of very good actors. Some of which were not A list but hovered in the next level. However, there were too many of them who each had too few lines to really stand apart from the others and get an award. The characters they played also tended to be a little more one dimensional than in the books or what the Academy would like to see. That said, the over-all level of acting in the films was quite good. This was recognized by the Screen Actors Guild who gave the film the award for best ensemble acting and nominated it for the same award last year.
Yes, the Academy does give some awards to 'A' list people who had strong but not awesome performance. I think your Jack example as well as this year's award to Renee Zellweger show this - perhaps even the Sean Penn one. If you're nominated and passed over enough times, the Academy sometimes rewards a strong performance with an award to recognize the last several very good performances. To some extent, that's why LOTR won everything this time around and not last. It's not that ROTK was that much better than TT, but that the whole epic was so deserving.
My Bias: I'm a fan of open source, and actively contribute to a project but have some doubts.
I see where the money comes from. Supporting products that are in the field. Where is the money in giving back to existing product? Ok sure, choose Tomcat and build on top of that for your company and get paid. That makes sense. But why should you or your company spend money developing for Tomcat. If you've built a product for internal use, why open source it and give away your new found advantage? If you are starting a consultancy company, is it worth your time to build a project from the ground up and then support it or would you be better off mastering an existing product and making money more quickly and having more potential customers quicker?
There is the Sourceforge model though. You release a product as open source, and use that as branding for your more sophisticated closed source project.
Guess we won't have to witness the Nerd Riots after all. And I had my D20 prepared and everything.
Never had more fun watching the Oscars. That said, by the end, I almost felt sad that so many other films weren't winning. Oh well, I'm sure it was an honor just to be nominated.
Most recent games might have an edge, but it isn't a free ride. Check out the gamespy contest and see Mike Tyson's Punch-Out beat Madden 2004 a game that is not only hugely popular but also 16 years newer.
Fair enough point. I do use the L trigger for block, which limits me to one built in combo on the R trigger. It might sound lame, but I have a bitch of a time hitting the XY combo consistently. Some fraction of the time, I hit A and either do a move I didn't intend or start Soul Charging in the midst of a heated exhange.
To other comment about the cross combos on a diamond shape controller - that's easier to deal with. Firstly since each button is equally equipped (not everything goes through A). Secondly since there are only 2 difficult combos, your 2 triggers on the Dreamcast take care of this or just miss if you're a left blocker. Playstation has triggers galore but I'm not sure how they map since I haven't played the PS version.
Disclaimer - it's been a month since my last SC round.
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We should discuss the rise of the Inidian software industry some more.
Where did it come from?
1) Indians realized that to improve their lot in the world, they needed to get educated. Good for them.
2) In the US, writing software was a cool thing for about 30 seconds at the peak of the dot com era. Until then, we went through a period were hiring immigrants/H1-B was pretty much needed to fill the seats with quality people. Yes, we may have got a couple more than we needed, but I think with zero H1-Bs, the software expansion of the late 80s and 90s wouldn't have had the bodies it needed to happen.
3) US programmers fucked up. Remember the Y2K bug? Suddenly, lots of boring programming needed to get done that nobody wanted to do. There already weren't enough programmers on the market to make employers happy. So they looked around, and bam, Indians set up some software companies to do this task. They earned credibility for doing that job well as well as funding to build themselves up.
4) The next time a project came up that a company didn't have the staff for, they knew they could depend on thier Indian partners. The rest is history.
So I guess Indian software companies grew out of natural trade. After a pinch where demand rises and we're forced to import. Is it your stand that we should cut off imports from abroad and decimate the fledgling industries we created overseas in order to keep them from competing with us? Yikes! I thought Republicans were cruel.
Oh fuck.
This was like a treatise in how to make an inefficient global economy that malfunctions everywhere you look.
India has a lot of talented software writers? They should write software for Indians. I guess they'll have to start by writing their own operating system from scratch. They could have a domestic operating system market instead of importing Windows or Linux from the rest of the world. I guess there's no need for them to import that. And I'm sure the generally poor population of India has a ton of software it needs written.
No. While your argument might concievably work for textiles, steel or cars (I don't believe it does) it is totally bogus in a knowledge driven community. How does natural trade work when there aren't any natural resources?
Ug. I just don't have the energy for this one. A couple tidbits though. Liberalization of the economy plus absurd rate of manufacturing has not impoverished China. They're economy is growing fast, faster than the government wants it to, fast enough that they may well kick off a spurt of global inflation. Out of this, some Chinese have become richer yes. Yes some peasants have moved to the cities and stayed poor. But the interesting phenomenon is the rise of Chinese middle class. This is not only making China want of the great potential markets to sell our goods to in the next decade (witness cars) but has also forced a shift by the regime there politcally. They've enshrined personal property in the Constitution - Mao is rolling in his grave. Will China be able to cut off supply of all it manufacters leaving the world screwed? Only if it wants to impoverish its new middle class. Even then, there is already a trend developing where China is losing manufacturing to cheaper parts of SE Asia.
This is also a great tradgedy in NAFTA. Mexico failed to play the global economy well. It got tons of manufacturing from NAFTA. It failed to leverage that into a stronger middle class and more modern, efficient factories. It's penalty? It's now losing many of those manufacturing jobs to even cheaper competitors.
Does this all benifit Americans? Yes and No. No, we are losing manufacturing jobs. No, we are now forced to compete in a global market for knowledge driven jobs as well. However, unless we strive to prevent the rise of manufacturing and knowledge work overseas, this is the reality of the world. We can either particpate or not. We know what it looks like if we participate, let's consider what it looks like if we don't.
I know I'm not going to understand the manufacture of whatever example I give well enough, but you'll get the gist.
Let's say Americans produce our own CD players. Other countries can produce CD players as well, just cheaper. So any country following natural trade will build the CD player if they can, or import it if they can't. We don't produce them the cheapest, so our exports will be in the neighborhood of zero. Labor costs will be higher, and perhaps the importing of the needed resources will be more expensive than our "competitors." However, with a lock on the US economy, the producer will stay in business. It will just cost the US consumer far more money to buy a CD player. Maybe $25 bucks instead of the $13 dollar one I saw at Target yesterday. So we get a couple of jobs and pay more for our CD players.
There's the crux. We lose the ability to export. We also lose a good chunk of the foriegn investment our economy depends on. As an added bonus we now have to pay more for the goods we buy. All this to protect industries that we are bad at. We'll form a shell around the country where we wind up exporting very little - others will reciprocate when we close down trade. The other economic powers will continue to benifit from free trade. Meanwhile, it will get worse. Do you think Nike is coming back? No. They'd go out of business if they did or perhaps become second rate. I guess they might have a near monopoly in the US if they did come back under your system though - interesting how that co
If you look at the context, I was answering his aside where he asked who was worse off between an unemployed American and an employed third worlder who was working in dangerous conditions to do the American's job. While it strikes me now that he might have been having real sympathy for the guy over there, I was pointing out that working in those conditions is far superior to the alternative.
As to your attack of would I be happy to be laid off due to off-shoring? Hell no. When faced with the options of taking a free-market position where I believe those jobs will come back to the US in some form or another or one where I think we need to shut doors and stop the bleeding, I have to keep the big view in mind.
Indians working jobs in my industry presents a major risk to me. The US IT market will lose global market share and might lose net jobs. At the same time, protectionism has risks. Some of that risk is that it keeps other countries in the Third World longer and slows the advent of markets for my company to sell its products into and for other American companies to do the same.
Right now, I'm living with the fear that my career choice might be a doomed one. I'm working to improve my skills in hopes that I'm able to keep my head above water. That and I'm trusting that the free market will work out.
The position I'm laying out is one which I believe has my best interest in mind. However, I counter those who try to put forth Humanitarian arguements that say that trade hurts the poor people overseas with what I believe are superior humanitarian arguements.
I'm forgetting the map name. But it had a square base with the vulnerable to the open air in the center. I would start matches with an odd technique: Suit up in medium armor with energy and hop a Shrike. Come in from the side, let the shrike bounce along the back of the base, swipe the flag and get out. Usually in the begining, people got the turrets up quick enough that light armor was still at risk of getting pinged to death, but a medium could survive quite easily. Plus, everyone was so busy setting up, that you could actually make it back to the shrike as often as not.
Ok which is worse - A US worker losses his job, goes on unemployment and has to depend on his wife's inadaquate job to try to make ends meet. Perhaps now he can't send his kids to college. They either pay their own way or get a job.
Or B, the US worker keeps his job and is happy. Meanwhile, instead of having a job at below the ->US- minimum wage building cars, a man in the third world has to depend on his children and wife working or begging in order to avoid going hungry. His children don't recieve an education to speak of, let alone thinking of college. Without an education, his children will never be "middle class".
Indian and Chinese programmers or auto workers who make far far less money than their US counter-parts are part of a growing middle class in their socities. Other factory workers have made the move from desperately poor to merely poor. A reason their salaries can be so low is that the rest of the labor in their countries is so cheap that they can live quite well on a relatively small amount of money - I'm thinking programmers here not textile workers.
Ah, but you saw that there is still rampant child labor that is offensive. 10 year-old girls working 12 hour days instead of going to school. Is that ideal? No. Is it better than them being sold in slavery / prostituation at the age of 13? You bet.
Is the US going to have a huge amount of competition in nearly every industry? Yes we are. We're disadvanteged because we're so rich that it costs a lot to pay an American to do something. We've got the advantage in that a huge percentage of our people are college educated and we have a very very extensive university system that attracts some of the best minds from across the world. That our labor practices are barbaric by European standards gives us an advatage over them as capital spent here is at less risk. It helps to be able to fire people and ask them to work long days in a pinch.
I agree that a vibrant middle class is the key to success. I'm also nervous that offshoring competition creates a race to the bottom in labor standards. At the same time, Europe has been able to survive competition with the US for quite some time - albiet with 10% unemployment. If the US continues to work its ass off it'll be fine. But we'll need continued government investment in the right places to make that happen.
Having played both, and loving each, I'll share:
It's really all about pace for me and actual thinking. Most of the time, UT2K4 and the like are played a truly frenetic pace. From time to time, a handful of players will be standing still sniping or moving only a little while babysitting an objective or flag. While you are moving in UT2K4, you are moving fast and it's intense. UT2K4 is never peaceful, nor are there generally large strategic decisions.
Tribes (I played 2) can be peaceful. There are those wide open areas that you can navigate very quickly with light armor and skill but otherwise are slow to traverse on foot. You can also contribute to your team while remaining almost ignorant of combat going on around you and certaintly not firing a gun. To do this, you run around deploying sensors, or turrets or what have you or carry a repair gun to glue stuff back together. (Yes, link gun in 2K4 does this, but it feels like kludge)
It also makes a big differance that there are vehicles in capture the flag. And they work in that environment. One of the more beautiful team efforts you'll see in Tribes is one player grabbing the flag and begining to run home. Another player on his team will be flying a Shrike (a small hover plane) and will fly past the flag carrier and park the plan in his path. Guy #2 jumps out, the flag carrier jumps in and starts flying home.
There are just so many interesting tactical / strategic things to do in Tribes that aren't there in UT2K4. That's the selling point. I'll share two favorites.
You have becons. Usually you use them to let your team know where you've put something useful. They can also be put in target mode. All your teamates guns will see a dot which lets them know where to fire to hit your becon. Sounds a little useless until you put one on the underside of an enemy's defensive turret or vehicle station. Suddenly your teamates are lobbing mortars from halfway across the map with pinpoint accuracy to destroy things. Funny as hell.
The other is on a map that is normally dominated by snipers. There is a huge open area between the two relatively close flags that can be picked off. On the edges of these are a series of canyons. You can be daring and load up heavy (slow) armor and walk the canyons mortar in hand. If you manage to sneak up properly from behind. The map is hilariously set up so that well shot mortars are trapped and held in a small room that contains the enemy reequiping stations. Killing a stack of people and trashing those stations that way is hilarious.
Finally, in Tribes, when the action heats up and its a clutch moment, your adreniline does kick up. The cool thing about UT2K4 is that you're almost always at that level of intesity. Mostly because of that small field of view.
Frankly, while the vehicles in UT are very cool and the new mode is fun, I just don't think it's right. UT feels too high paced to have tank battles. I really feel that while the new modes are great, UT is at its finest when there aren't vehicles, when it's played on smallish maps between two fairly small teams. UT's indoor maps tend to be very very good, while the outdoor ones feel bland and average. Tribes had the opposite problem. Their interiors were pretty lame compared to the vast expenses between bases.
So why look at Tribes? Because you want a gaming experience that is more interesting, if slower paced. Why ignore Tribes? The learning curve is a bitch and it takes forever to finally get your first spinfusor kill.
Frankly, I'd much rather a green LED than a blue one that has a piece of tape over it. That's not nearly as slick. You're also proving his point that the blue ones are visually distracting and too damn bright. They make the end user take steps to address the intrusiveness. That's a problem.
One solution is in fact to wipe everything out. The mud I used to play did this every couple of years. There were other approaches in place as well, such as progressively slower levelling and pretty much requiring groups to work together to level. It helps, but isn't perfect. More importantly is developing a culture within the game where having the best ___ isn't the most important thing to most of the players. Encouraging people to do creative and interesting things was key. People don't want to be the best, they want to be important. In a game that isn't very interesting, be it gameplay or culturally, the only way to be important is to be super-high level, or really ugly or rich. If a game has more ways to express yourself, there will be more ways to be important. That and MUDs often have the advantage of having a smaller player base than something like EQ. It's easier to stand out among fewer people.
It isn't unstoppable - I'm sure it can be prevented. I suspect the problem is with bad parenting or schooling. We should form a commission to find out!
Disclaimer: I don't know how to make this idea workable.
Instead of only paying for the channels I want, I want to only pay for the TV I watch. Essentially make everything pay-per-view. HBO would be more expensive than Comedy Central than broadcast. Now if only there was a good way to decide whether the TV was on or not at a given time. Everything comes to my house and I decide whether to watch it or not based on today's programming.
While I tend to agree that the government should recognize same sex couples as families, I think you go too far when saying, "The notion that giving somebody else the same rights you have is somehow weakening yours is stupid and craven."
Look at an example like giving women the right to vote (something I support). When this is done, my manly vote is only half as potent as it once was. If gay people get tax breaks given to straight couples, either the government loses revenue or taxes need to go up. If they are able to adopt children the already long waiting periods to adopt will increase. There consequences of giving gay couples the right to marry or form unions might not be huge for us straight people, but they do exist.
So no, giving my rights to somebody else won't weaken my rights. But they will make the benifits less advantagous. That said, I don't think what I just discussed is what most people who are against gay marriage are really concerned with.
I was under the impression that that was already regulated under the catagory of sexual. NBC would get fined to no end if the started airing porn at 7:00 instead of Friends.
I think you wrote my post better than I did, and more quickly too :). I fully agree.
Go straight to your manager and let him know that your ability to do your job is being impacted by the current policies. Be prepared to talk over the options you have for doing your job now that the policy is in place. One of those is to push for an exception. Others might include the company buying you a cell phone that is clearly just for company purposes - a pager could be appropriate as well. You know the situation better than me, think of them.
Be prepared to answer the question from your manager that asks if your current set-up makes sense. What happens if you get a better offer, and leave the company? Is there a good way for somebody else who doesn't have a cell phone to be notified? Should there be a central clearinghouse for these alerts other than your cell phone?
If you and your manager agree that sending messages to your cell phone is the way to go, gettnig an exception is more likely to happen with your direct manager's help. Should you get that exception, document it. You wouldn't want the next round of layoffs to be easy for them.
Forgive me, but I don't think this is a huge deal. Someone made a policy whose intent was to keep people from using their cell phones at work for personal reason, so that meetings would go smoother and folks would be more productive. They didn't know or think that cell phones were being used for work activities. It's not in the interest of anyone at the company to make your life more difficult.
On the broader question of employee owned tech, I think that the main reason companies are and should be cautious is that when you leave, you're going to take your tech with you. Anything they've paid you to set up and that uses your tech suddenly breaks. That sucks. Which comes back to the problem of what happens when you leave and the notices are going to your phone. I really think the answer is that they back off the no cell phones and move it to no personal cell phones. Those of you who need cell phones are then given corporate cell phones. That way, when you leave they give the phone to your fill-in / replacement and the system still works.
Then again, if the phone the message is being sent to can be universally changed by filling out one web form, it becomes dispensible and they just need to hire somebody with a cell phone.
There was a section where you can take an Asimov IQ test. So there's at least some nods being given. I never did read I, Robot, but I do hope they stay somewhat true to flavor. At least now more than just geeks will know the three laws of robotics - and that can't be a bad thing.
Thanks for pointing that out. That was the unstated part of my point which goes directly to the parent's arguement.
I think the key difference is that the XBox has a hardrive. Those HD are pretty useful relative to being limited to flash and burned media for storage.
I always hated level restricted areas. It just didn't feel right. What we did instead was make a rule that if high level players were *responsible* for the deaths of lowbies, they would be punished. That included direct player killing which we tried to make impossible with hardcoding, but also dragging high level aggressive mobs into areas with lowbies and casting the blazing death clouds.
Awesome response. I appreciate the argument.
Look at the nominees for best actor and actress as well as the supporting roles. Sure there were quite a few "A" list people there, but there were those who just aren't. Looking at the women, we saw a nominee for a 13 year old's first film, an Iranian actress etc. Even Theron was the kind of actress who would hdardly be considered for a nomination until she put forth a great performance this year.
In LOTR you had a collection of very good actors. Some of which were not A list but hovered in the next level. However, there were too many of them who each had too few lines to really stand apart from the others and get an award. The characters they played also tended to be a little more one dimensional than in the books or what the Academy would like to see. That said, the over-all level of acting in the films was quite good. This was recognized by the Screen Actors Guild who gave the film the award for best ensemble acting and nominated it for the same award last year.
Yes, the Academy does give some awards to 'A' list people who had strong but not awesome performance. I think your Jack example as well as this year's award to Renee Zellweger show this - perhaps even the Sean Penn one. If you're nominated and passed over enough times, the Academy sometimes rewards a strong performance with an award to recognize the last several very good performances. To some extent, that's why LOTR won everything this time around and not last. It's not that ROTK was that much better than TT, but that the whole epic was so deserving.
My Bias: I'm a fan of open source, and actively contribute to a project but have some doubts.
I see where the money comes from. Supporting products that are in the field. Where is the money in giving back to existing product? Ok sure, choose Tomcat and build on top of that for your company and get paid. That makes sense. But why should you or your company spend money developing for Tomcat. If you've built a product for internal use, why open source it and give away your new found advantage? If you are starting a consultancy company, is it worth your time to build a project from the ground up and then support it or would you be better off mastering an existing product and making money more quickly and having more potential customers quicker?
There is the Sourceforge model though. You release a product as open source, and use that as branding for your more sophisticated closed source project.
Guess we won't have to witness the Nerd Riots after all. And I had my D20 prepared and everything.
Never had more fun watching the Oscars. That said, by the end, I almost felt sad that so many other films weren't winning. Oh well, I'm sure it was an honor just to be nominated.
It's best Foriegn Language Film. The Canadian film was in French. That said, there was enough non-english spoken for me :).
Most recent games might have an edge, but it isn't a free ride. Check out the gamespy contest and see Mike Tyson's Punch-Out beat Madden 2004 a game that is not only hugely popular but also 16 years newer.
Fair enough point. I do use the L trigger for block, which limits me to one built in combo on the R trigger. It might sound lame, but I have a bitch of a time hitting the XY combo consistently. Some fraction of the time, I hit A and either do a move I didn't intend or start Soul Charging in the midst of a heated exhange.
To other comment about the cross combos on a diamond shape controller - that's easier to deal with. Firstly since each button is equally equipped (not everything goes through A). Secondly since there are only 2 difficult combos, your 2 triggers on the Dreamcast take care of this or just miss if you're a left blocker. Playstation has triggers galore but I'm not sure how they map since I haven't played the PS version.
Disclaimer - it's been a month since my last SC round.