IMHO, RPGs, are the most time consuming type of game you can play and serve primarily to feed the the player's obsessive-compulsive instincts for very little, if any, tangible benefit. You basically run around behaving repetitively & collecting as much virtual crap as you can. Your reward is "experience" which can only be taken advantage of with further gameplay. I find the crack analogies to be very compelling.
It's no wonder that game companies want to extend the model to other game genres. They want you to keep playing & paying.
Granted, many games cater to your inner, OCD afflicted hunter-gatherer but few genres keep you on the hook as purposefully and for as long as a RPG will.
The RPGificataion of the COD series started with the addition of "Perks" & levels. I found this to be immediately detrimental to the game. The number of custom servers was reduced dramatically. Few people wanted to run an 'un-ranked' server despite the fact that all the serious players would rank up in a few weeks, after which time experience was essentially meaningless.
This led to thousands of generic servers with more or less the same set of rules and levels.
Yet players clung on, even ranking up all over again for the ridiculous "prestige" levels. The erosion of gameplay had begun, it's now less about the game play and more about collecting meaningless, virtual experience points.
Now throw in the massive growth of consoles and you can see where this is going.
Millions of lemmings competing for bragging rights over virtual perks. No thanks.
I will even go so far as to say this is bad for IT. I got into this field because of video games. I learned a lot about computers & networks because games, the modification of games, the modification of hardware to make the games run, (and yes, even the obtaining of games for free from dubious sources), were a big incentive for me to figure out out the damn things worked. I wonder what kind of incentive the average young X-Box owner has.
I live in San Jose, CA, which used to have a first rate paper...
So true. When I left SJ last year the Merc had been reduced to nearly exclusively running AP/Reuters stories with the editorials, when not copped from the NYT or LAT, bemoaning this sorry state. The San Francisco Chronicle had become the best newspaper in northern California.
RTFA, there's no speech to UI control on a Kindle. They can't navigate the software or e-books even if the Kindle can read it to them.
Regular books are available in braille.
http://refx.com/
While their Nexus 1 was referred to as simply Nexus (or Nexus 1.x) Their Nexus 2 is Nexus^2.
Maybe Google just needs to cube it.
Great synth, btw
Yes, and I would loved to have gone to Israel but alas, only one passport and I couldn't start the trip in Israel or Egypt. As it was we didn't have nearly enough time to do everything we would have liked in the countries we did visit. I highly recommend the journey though. Especially to other Americans. I think it was the best ever and I've been around the world once or twice.
I've turned down 3 or 4 promotions like this and have always kept my job.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, however. At some point you may wish you took the promotion. I'm wondering if I shouldn't have. I guess it depends on what you want to do for the rest of your career. Management is not necessarily a bad thing to have on your resume.
Screen refresh is far too slow on the ones I've used. In their current form, e-paper readers are really only good for reading things straight through... like novels. I also read a newspaper (grabbed from a web site) or two. I find that I don't get through a e-paper as fast a real one, mainly because I'm forced to read the whole thing sequentially. I don't mind this too much. I think I read more of the paper now, but... the point is, they make terrible reference/text books unless you don't mind doing a search for everything you're looking for. Even then, they are still far slower than what most people would find acceptable. You can't quickly or easily flip through books at this point.
I suggest more real world examples in the man pages. I frequently find myself trying do tasks that I think would be relatively simple and common, only to to find the examples lacking and having to wade through and decipher dozens of obscure and poorly explained switches.
I'm generally downloading h.264.mkvs which are definitely not supported out of the box... and not possible to play at all with subtitles, the last time I looked. (probably a work around by now)
I can get mkvs to work in Win7 MCE but I'm still not happy with the interface or performance in general. I've also seen instances where the exact same tweaks on comparable hardware work one one PC but stutter on the next. (not necessarily MCE's fault but I don't have this issue with other MC software on the same hardware)
MCE is nice and has come a long way but it's not exactly intended for use with random downloadable content of dubious legality and never will be. MCE updates have a tendency to undo or break my tweaks which, while not surprising, is unacceptable.
Yes, MCE is pretty good as a out-of-the-box DVR. However, it can suck if you regularly download video to watch. It can neither play much of it (out-of-the-box) nor does it organize it very well. Be pepared to tweak.
I also find it to be a bit piggish on resources. The interface is slower than I'm used to. It is often useless if accessing shared files over a wireless connection as it spends too much time & bandwidth indexing generating thumbnail previews to playback video properly. (on a 150Mbps (maybe 30-50 actual) N connection) Again, be prepared to tweak.
I find it to be absolutely horrible if you have a very large (thousands of files) and dynamic collection of multimedia files. (I'm looking at about 250GB of music and a TB of video) My stuff is organized well enough in the file system and I'd prefer my media center not index it but just use the existing directory structure.
MCE is pretty and works OK if you have a small/stable multimedia collection and also use it in the fairly limited way that Microsoft wants/expects you to but I prefer Media Portal. (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) It also requires tweaking but is far, FAR more flexible, and the end result works better for me.
Finally, MCE on 7 is an improvement over MCE on Vista, but hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I did the same thing. That scene left a bad taste in my mouth. I viewed it as a pretty cheap shot... providing a virtual Columbine-like experience for the seriously twisted. I have no interest in pretend shooting at people who don't shoot back.
I don't play FPSes for the story or moral lessons. Nor am I pretending to be someone else when I play. I am playing myself in a game of skill against other real humans. The single player games don't even interest me that much (I never even finished the original Half-Life... gasp!) FPS is not RPG nor do I want it to be.
Infinity Ward has, for the first time since Doom, caused me to consider whether or not I should be playing FPS games at all. Given that they've also neutered multi-player experience with MW2, I think I'll at least stop playing this one.
Right on. That's my thought exactly. Dedicated servers provide a place for regulars to hang out.
And it's much more fun playing with regulars than random people every time.
"you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it. "
Ok, let me rephrase that. "I can't figure out what it's good for with regard to my clients."
And I can't. I know what it does. I just can't, with a straight face, anyway, recommend it as a way to improve anything they do without a) increasing costs, b) increasing complexity, and c) limiting their options. The customer isn't always an idiot and they won't always spend money on something they don't really need or want. (except in the case where it is bundled)
My point was.... MS is probably counting all of those unused, bundled installations as users.
Oh... and as it stands, we make a comfortable living selling non-MS solutions, more specifically tailored to our customer's needs. The ruthless capitalist in me thinks that pushing SharePoint would probably just cut into our margins.
I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).
Slashdot Mirror
That's a great way to put it.
IMHO, RPGs, are the most time consuming type of game you can play and serve primarily to feed the the player's obsessive-compulsive instincts for very little, if any, tangible benefit. You basically run around behaving repetitively & collecting as much virtual crap as you can. Your reward is "experience" which can only be taken advantage of with further gameplay. I find the crack analogies to be very compelling.
It's no wonder that game companies want to extend the model to other game genres. They want you to keep playing & paying.
Granted, many games cater to your inner, OCD afflicted hunter-gatherer but few genres keep you on the hook as purposefully and for as long as a RPG will.
The RPGificataion of the COD series started with the addition of "Perks" & levels. I found this to be immediately detrimental to the game. The number of custom servers was reduced dramatically. Few people wanted to run an 'un-ranked' server despite the fact that all the serious players would rank up in a few weeks, after which time experience was essentially meaningless.
This led to thousands of generic servers with more or less the same set of rules and levels.
Yet players clung on, even ranking up all over again for the ridiculous "prestige" levels. The erosion of gameplay had begun, it's now less about the game play and more about collecting meaningless, virtual experience points.
Now throw in the massive growth of consoles and you can see where this is going.
Millions of lemmings competing for bragging rights over virtual perks. No thanks.
I will even go so far as to say this is bad for IT.
I got into this field because of video games. I learned a lot about computers & networks because games, the modification of games, the modification of hardware to make the games run, (and yes, even the obtaining of games for free from dubious sources), were a big incentive for me to figure out out the damn things worked. I wonder what kind of incentive the average young X-Box owner has.
I live in San Jose, CA, which used to have a first rate paper...
So true. When I left SJ last year the Merc had been reduced to nearly exclusively running AP/Reuters stories with the editorials, when not copped from the NYT or LAT, bemoaning this sorry state. The San Francisco Chronicle had become the best newspaper in northern California.
RTFA, there's no speech to UI control on a Kindle. They can't navigate the software or e-books even if the Kindle can read it to them. Regular books are available in braille.
As subsequent news has proved me wrong I'd like to ammend my initial analysis to:
"It's amateur hour at Al Qaeda in Yemen"
I refuse to be afraid.
http://refx.com/ While their Nexus 1 was referred to as simply Nexus (or Nexus 1.x) Their Nexus 2 is Nexus^2. Maybe Google just needs to cube it. Great synth, btw
Crazy loner sets off home made firecracker on plane and lights pants on fire.
Will high school newspapers have to remove the Papal Coat of Arms from their Vatican news columns?
Just how many high schools would this be a problem for? (and one would assume that Catholic schools would be exempt...)
It seems to me the move is attempt to stifle criticism, satire, & parody.
I agree. There is no way that was made for $300.00.
Not unless he's using free equipment/software, not paying anyone else for anything, and not counting his own hours as an expense.
And vice versa...
Yes, and I would loved to have gone to Israel but alas, only one passport and I couldn't start the trip in Israel or Egypt. As it was we didn't have nearly enough time to do everything we would have liked in the countries we did visit. I highly recommend the journey though. Especially to other Americans. I think it was the best ever and I've been around the world once or twice.
This is why I skipped Israel on my way from Turkey to Egypt.
BTW, Syria was simply lovely.
I've turned down 3 or 4 promotions like this and have always kept my job.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, however. At some point you may wish you took the promotion. I'm wondering if I shouldn't have. I guess it depends on what you want to do for the rest of your career. Management is not necessarily a bad thing to have on your resume.
Screen refresh is far too slow on the ones I've used. In their current form, e-paper readers are really only good for reading things straight through... like novels. I also read a newspaper (grabbed from a web site) or two. I find that I don't get through a e-paper as fast a real one, mainly because I'm forced to read the whole thing sequentially. I don't mind this too much. I think I read more of the paper now, but... the point is, they make terrible reference/text books unless you don't mind doing a search for everything you're looking for. Even then, they are still far slower than what most people would find acceptable. You can't quickly or easily flip through books at this point.
Not only that, the man page rarely has useful examples, one of the biggest problems.
Hear, hear.. more and useful examples would go a very long way.
I suggest more real world examples in the man pages. I frequently find myself trying do tasks that I think would be relatively simple and common, only to to find the examples lacking and having to wade through and decipher dozens of obscure and poorly explained switches.
I'm generally downloading h.264 .mkvs which are definitely not supported out of the box... and not possible to play at all with subtitles, the last time I looked. (probably a work around by now)
I can get mkvs to work in Win7 MCE but I'm still not happy with the interface or performance in general. I've also seen instances where the exact same tweaks on comparable hardware work one one PC but stutter on the next. (not necessarily MCE's fault but I don't have this issue with other MC software on the same hardware)
MCE is nice and has come a long way but it's not exactly intended for use with random downloadable content of dubious legality and never will be. MCE updates have a tendency to undo or break my tweaks which, while not surprising, is unacceptable.
Just my opinion. Use what works for you.
Yes, MCE is pretty good as a out-of-the-box DVR. However, it can suck if you regularly download video to watch. It can neither play much of it (out-of-the-box) nor does it organize it very well. Be pepared to tweak.
I also find it to be a bit piggish on resources. The interface is slower than I'm used to. It is often useless if accessing shared files over a wireless connection as it spends too much time & bandwidth indexing generating thumbnail previews to playback video properly. (on a 150Mbps (maybe 30-50 actual) N connection) Again, be prepared to tweak.
I find it to be absolutely horrible if you have a very large (thousands of files) and dynamic collection of multimedia files. (I'm looking at about 250GB of music and a TB of video) My stuff is organized well enough in the file system and I'd prefer my media center not index it but just use the existing directory structure.
MCE is pretty and works OK if you have a small/stable multimedia collection and also use it in the fairly limited way that Microsoft wants/expects you to but I prefer Media Portal. (http://www.team-mediaportal.com/) It also requires tweaking but is far, FAR more flexible, and the end result works better for me.
Finally, MCE on 7 is an improvement over MCE on Vista, but hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Alien race re-creates humans based on DNA sequence received from Arecibo. Hilarity ensues....
Citation needed. Please list one game that portrays the US military in a bad light.
I did the same thing. That scene left a bad taste in my mouth. I viewed it as a pretty cheap shot... providing a virtual Columbine-like experience for the seriously twisted. I have no interest in pretend shooting at people who don't shoot back.
I don't play FPSes for the story or moral lessons. Nor am I pretending to be someone else when I play. I am playing myself in a game of skill against other real humans. The single player games don't even interest me that much (I never even finished the original Half-Life... gasp!) FPS is not RPG nor do I want it to be.
Infinity Ward has, for the first time since Doom, caused me to consider whether or not I should be playing FPS games at all. Given that they've also neutered multi-player experience with MW2, I think I'll at least stop playing this one.
Oh... and if I was Russian, I'd be pissed too.
... on what grounds TDS sued the town? This is not explained in the article.
Right on. That's my thought exactly. Dedicated servers provide a place for regulars to hang out. And it's much more fun playing with regulars than random people every time.
"you would LEARN what its good for, and make money SHOWING your clients what they can do with it. "
Ok, let me rephrase that. "I can't figure out what it's good for with regard to my clients."
And I can't. I know what it does. I just can't, with a straight face, anyway, recommend it as a way to improve anything they do without a) increasing costs, b) increasing complexity, and c) limiting their options. The customer isn't always an idiot and they won't always spend money on something they don't really need or want. (except in the case where it is bundled)
My point was.... MS is probably counting all of those unused, bundled installations as users.
Oh... and as it stands, we make a comfortable living selling non-MS solutions, more specifically tailored to our customer's needs.
The ruthless capitalist in me thinks that pushing SharePoint would probably just cut into our margins.
Not that I'm a ruthless capitalist or anything.
I work for a small computer support firm and we have around 400 SBS 2003 and 2008 customers. All of them have Sharepoint installed. None of them know it exists. Exactly one of them uses it for anything (web access to shared calendar).
Hell, I can't even figure out what it's good for.
The stupid deserve what they get.
Yes, and if you are too stupid to un-friend the person you have a restraining order against, perhaps you deserve a poke.