If you don't like the graphics, you can do some things:
* You can contribute better, more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
* You can set up a foundation that pays someone to contribute more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
* You can whine on Slashdot about how FreeCIV's graphics suck.
Or, a fourth, more likely option:
You can play a better game, commercially developed, polished and enjoyable to play.
Just because a game is open-source doesn't make it any good. Also, the point is that the person who started the thread was stating that Freeciv already has the features of the current civilisation games, and that the upcoming release would 'blow our minds'. In your response, you didn't deny that Freeciv wasn't very good, instead you tried to excuse its faults. Therefore it seems you agree that the game isn't very good, and so why aren't you criticising the thread-starter for making false claims, rather than criticising the grandparent post for criticising the claims made by the original post.
The flow of conversation usually goes thusly:
Person A: Use this open-source software, it's as good as, or better, than the commercial alternatives. Person B: Wait a minute, no it isn't, it lacks features, x, y and z, and has an awful interface. Person C: Well, they're doing it for free, if you don't like it then improve it yourself!
This doesn't really solve any problems, it just makes people resent open source software. They might find it awful or not like certain features, but if they admit it they get attacked for not improving it themselves. This means people will just ignore open souce software completely just to get away from the zealots.
For the record, I think that Freeciv's graphics look worse than Civilisation 1, which I got free on a CD nearly a decade ago. Perhaps the gameplay is better, but I wouldn't know because I've never managed to get it working. Like a lot of people, I'm prepared to pay for a good quality game rather than wrestle with a free one.
As a contractor.. 1. You don't get benifits. 2. You have to pay your own taxes. 3. You're disposable for termination at any moment. 4. You're just hired labour, not an asset to the company. 5. You can be sued directly as your effictively "self employeed" depending on what's in the terms and agreement of the said contract.
As a standard permanent employee, you don't get benefits, you get screwed because your employer does your taxes (meaning you have to spend years chasing the inland revenue to get it back), you're disposable for termination at any moment, and you're hired labour rather than an asset to the company.
Perhaps you're right on the last point though. Also as a contractor you're not tied to the company so you don't have to put up with as much shit.
What? That's outrageous, I pay more than that for 28k dialup with strict usage limits. Although a 2GB monthly cap pretty much makes a 1152k connection almost useless.
what better to create an animal with human dexterity without the burden of intelligence, without the moral dillema of the "handicapped"... such a worker would toil in a sweatshop with singlemindedness, as oxen would plow a field.
Well, going on what your definition of 'ho' is, most women are hos, in fact nearly all of them. Too many men have delusions about how pure and innocent women are. They probably watch too much TV.
C. I still can't make head nor tail of it. First language I learnt I think, after basic. Eventually programming just gets boring though. Everything interesting has already been programmed so what's the point? Everything you're doing is just a shitty imitation of something that's been done better by a million people.
I know people who are very successful programmers, and not graduates. They are smart, though. They get the job done.
Well, I'm not smart, I don't get anything done. I'm just terrible at programming, I can't learn it, now it's just boring.
They hustled to find bits of work to get a name. Some people did stuff for free - built websites for businesses owned by friends and got a reputation from that.
No way I'd do that. It's miserable enough working for money, let alone for free. Says a lot for your 'friends' if you make you work on their website and don't pay you.
If I know a school programmer, my advice would be to learn programming early (like at school), practise like crazy and write a ton of OSS and shareware. Market yourself through your creations and get a junior programmer job that way.
So how do you learn how to program without any education? I've been trying to teach myself programming for the better half of a decade and haven't gotten anywhere, I can barely write anything better than 'hello world'. Anything bigger just ends in countless segfaults because pointers and shit like that are a complete fucking mystery and always go wrong.
Also how do you motivate yourself to learn something knowing that even if you spend years learning if you're still going to be useless, and even if you are good at it, no employers are going to hire someone with no proper qualifications and who's spent the last ten years of their life doing manual labour?
I can just imagine the interview:
INTERVIEWER: "So, you've got no qualifications, absolutely no experience, no references, and you're applying for a job where we have a hundred applicants all with degrees and 10+ years experience?" ME: "Yes" INTERVIEWER: "Fuck off"
So young geeks/nerds/tools - Talk to girls, ask them out, you have nothing to lose, but your virginity.
Except your self-respect, and your confidence, when you're rejected and humiliated time and time again, and the dawning realisation that you're completely unattractive to the opposite sex.
Take my advice: never talk to girls, then at least you can use that as an excuse as to why you don't get any success. Delusion is often better than the awful truth.
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life."
Actually, it is. High school was shit. Really fucking awful. When people said the above, I didn't believe it, I thought: "Like it can get any worse...". Since then it's been all downhill, every year is worse than the last. When they say your schooldays are the best of your life, they actually meant it.
However that begs the question that if you're having fun and enjoying your life, is that time really wasted? In order for time to be well spent, does it have to have a tangable end result?
There's nothing in High School worth studying. It's all bullshit busy work.
Let's see... Trig, calculus, physics, chemistry.
I can't recall a single time in my entire life where I've EVER used any of that. Never. It has had absolutely NO use in my life, and it probably never will. All that time learning crap like maths and science I could have been doing something useful.
Economics, history. Required to understand that most politicians are either fools or liars.
You can realise that without going to school at all.
English (i.e. literature). Mostly a waste of time. Not once did a teacher explain what made some writing good and other bad. The stuff we had to read was almost always dull. I bought and read books on my own (mostly SF), and as poorly written as it was, it was better than "classical literature".
Yeah, English lessons seem to always go the following way:
1) Find the lamest, blandest, crappest poem ever written by the worst author ever. 2) Over-analyse it again and again until it's completely destroyed. 3) Write a load of crap about it that no-one's going to read anyway.
Going to a four-year college and getting a degree really isn't all that important anymore. Yeah, you get a job, yeah you get money, and yeah you have fun but honestly the pay off in the end really isn't all that worth it.
I'd say that having fun, having a decent job and having money are probably some of the most important things you can get. I'd say it's definitely worth it. I dropped out of college after the first year and now I'm stuck working in a dead-end factory job, probably for the rest of my life, which means I'll never have any fun or have any money. Compared to that, I'd say that college and a decent office job is the better option.
Also I think that four years of drinking/partying is better than four years rotting away in a filthy factory.
I am a Linux Systems Administrator of 20 machines for a small time company in a small town of 50,000(which is the county seat). I command a salary of $28,000 and I am told to like it.
Sounds alright to me. That's a lot more than average, and you're sat down all day, it's not like you're really working, and you get decent hours rather than 12 hour night shifts. What is there to complain about? I'd swap my position for yours in a heartbeat.
>>Livejournal is something like 65:35 female:male. >It's cute to see such naivety still on the internet. Never played any MMORPGs, huh?
This is different to MMORPGs, MMORPGs are generally a male domain, with men pretending to be women to get favours. On the other hand, blogs involve things women like doing, i.e. fucking going on and on about shit no-one cares about.
Employers who say "blah, I own the copyright I can do anything I want" quickly discover that no-one wants to work for them.
As long as there are a hundred people wanting to work in making computer games for every available job, there will always be people wanting to work for computer game companies, no matter how 'evil' they are.
I'm no graphics expert, but the main thing that struck me was the way the ground sort of 'blurred' as it goes into the background. I don't know why they've done this, even the buildings in the background aren't blurred, so you have jagged buildings sitting on smooth blurred ground.
On closer inspection, the edges are terrible. See the horse for instance, it looks like it's been badly cut and pasted from another picture, with the cutting-boundary drawn by hand with a faulty mouse. By a blind person.
The shadowing is backwards as well. Notice how the buildings on the right cast (bad) shadows to the left, but the horse casts a shadow to the right. Or maybe the world has several suns or something.
Automation will free us from mindless, boring, and/or dangerous work
Free us to do what? When one job is obsoleted another doesn't suddenly take its place. So when all the factory workers lose their jobs, what happens to them and their families?
Aren't we all so fortunate to be alive now?
As a factory worker, I'd say no. It might be alright for you computer types with your massive wages, but there are other people in the world you know.
When companies export IT jobs to India, there's page after page of slashdot posts criticising it, complaining how it's unfair because it will mean computer programmers being put out of jobs. But when some fancy new robot comes along that puts other people out of jobs, you don't care.
Don't forget getting a OS/software setup that works properly with all your hardware, including the remote control, and a way to link it up to your telly properly.
The natural state of affairs for intellectual property is that it is worthless. If caveman A invents a bow and arrow, caveman B is free to make their own copy without worrying about patent infringement. However, caveman A still invents the bow and arrow because he's tired of running after rabbits and hitting them on the head with a club. It's much easier to shoot from a distance.
However this is a lot different to the current state of affairs. Caveman A uses his bow and arrow to get his food. Even if every other caveman is using his invention, he can still kill rabbits and use them to feed himself.
But if a software developer writes a program, it might solve a problem, but if everyone else rips it off rather than paying him for it, how does he feed himself? He can't use the software to acquire food, or money to pay his bills/mortgage/credit card payments, unless people pay him for his software.
We don't live in the Stone Age anymore, people generally survive by exchanging work for money, which they then use to pay for things.
What is it with these angry zealots? They get all foamed up at the mouth just because you like different food to them. You don't get this sort of attitude about many other things. Is anyone else sick of people insulting people about their choice of pizza, going on and on about how people as clever as they are know that the best pizza comes from some place near where they live? As if it matters, or that it's anything more than their opinion?
Who defines what 'real' pizza is anyway? Just because it's made in some obscure place using an 'authentic' recipe doesn't mean it's any good. You can make crap pizza from great ingredients and vice versa.
Pizza made from decent sauce instead of the slightly flavored tomato paste Dominoes uses.
Sauce? On pizza? You don't put sauce on REAL pizza, you're obviously eating some horrible dumbed-down pizza etc... See how easy it is to be arrogant and pretentious about a bloody bit of food that doesn't matter?
At the end of the day, it's only pizza, it's just some cheap greasy crappy junk food you eat when you're drunk or you can't be bothered to cook anything. There's no need to get so worked up about something that just ends up in the toilet.
Re:Quick Question
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Do all the jobs require an appitutude test? Or just the high ranking ones?
Almost every job does.
What, every one? Even the bloke who cleans the toilets, or the women in the canteen? You need 14 interviews to see if you can cook bacon and eggs?
If all the dictionaries report that a word is being used in the language, then either there is a conspiracy among dictionary editors, or the word is being used in the language.
Just because they report language, doesn't mean they report it accurately or only include words that are actually used. There are many ridiculous entries in dictionaries. It wouldn't be so bad, but people take dictionaries as an authority and use them to justify using obscure foreign words, when all they really want to do is look clever.
I'd like to argue further but I've got other things to do today, so I'll end by saying this:
But having been in English dictionaries for over 100 years does.
No it doesn't. Dictionaries are not an authority. Someone putting their pet foreign word into their dictionary doesn't make it an English word. Dictionaries are only supposed to report language usage, they don't define it.
English has a larger vocabulary than any other language. Nobody knows them all.
Well if there's a foreign word that next to no-one has heard of, and no-one uses, does it become an English word just because the occasional person uses it in an English sentence?
Slashdot Mirror
* You can contribute better, more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
* You can set up a foundation that pays someone to contribute more modern graphics to FreeCIV.
* You can whine on Slashdot about how FreeCIV's graphics suck.
Or, a fourth, more likely option:
You can play a better game, commercially developed, polished and enjoyable to play.
Just because a game is open-source doesn't make it any good. Also, the point is that the person who started the thread was stating that Freeciv already has the features of the current civilisation games, and that the upcoming release would 'blow our minds'. In your response, you didn't deny that Freeciv wasn't very good, instead you tried to excuse its faults. Therefore it seems you agree that the game isn't very good, and so why aren't you criticising the thread-starter for making false claims, rather than criticising the grandparent post for criticising the claims made by the original post.
The flow of conversation usually goes thusly:
Person A: Use this open-source software, it's as good as, or better, than the commercial alternatives.
Person B: Wait a minute, no it isn't, it lacks features, x, y and z, and has an awful interface.
Person C: Well, they're doing it for free, if you don't like it then improve it yourself!
This doesn't really solve any problems, it just makes people resent open source software. They might find it awful or not like certain features, but if they admit it they get attacked for not improving it themselves. This means people will just ignore open souce software completely just to get away from the zealots.
For the record, I think that Freeciv's graphics look worse than Civilisation 1, which I got free on a CD nearly a decade ago. Perhaps the gameplay is better, but I wouldn't know because I've never managed to get it working. Like a lot of people, I'm prepared to pay for a good quality game rather than wrestle with a free one.
Those two links point to 26-byte mp3s which don't give off any sound. It seems there is a problem at your end.
As a contractor..
1. You don't get benifits.
2. You have to pay your own taxes.
3. You're disposable for termination at any moment.
4. You're just hired labour, not an asset to the company.
5. You can be sued directly as your effictively "self employeed" depending on what's in the terms and agreement of the said contract.
As a standard permanent employee, you don't get benefits, you get screwed because your employer does your taxes (meaning you have to spend years chasing the inland revenue to get it back), you're disposable for termination at any moment, and you're hired labour rather than an asset to the company.
Perhaps you're right on the last point though. Also as a contractor you're not tied to the company so you don't have to put up with as much shit.
What? That's outrageous, I pay more than that for 28k dialup with strict usage limits. Although a 2GB monthly cap pretty much makes a 1152k connection almost useless.
what better to create an animal with human dexterity without the burden of intelligence, without the moral dillema of the "handicapped"... such a worker would toil in a sweatshop with singlemindedness, as oxen would plow a field.
Sounds like my job.
Well, going on what your definition of 'ho' is, most women are hos, in fact nearly all of them. Too many men have delusions about how pure and innocent women are. They probably watch too much TV.
What language are you starting out in?
C. I still can't make head nor tail of it. First language I learnt I think, after basic. Eventually programming just gets boring though. Everything interesting has already been programmed so what's the point? Everything you're doing is just a shitty imitation of something that's been done better by a million people.
I know people who are very successful programmers, and not graduates. They are smart, though. They get the job done.
Well, I'm not smart, I don't get anything done. I'm just terrible at programming, I can't learn it, now it's just boring.
They hustled to find bits of work to get a name. Some people did stuff for free - built websites for businesses owned by friends and got a reputation from that.
No way I'd do that. It's miserable enough working for money, let alone for free. Says a lot for your 'friends' if you make you work on their website and don't pay you.
If I know a school programmer, my advice would be to learn programming early (like at school), practise like crazy and write a ton of OSS and shareware. Market yourself through your creations and get a junior programmer job that way.
So how do you learn how to program without any education? I've been trying to teach myself programming for the better half of a decade and haven't gotten anywhere, I can barely write anything better than 'hello world'. Anything bigger just ends in countless segfaults because pointers and shit like that are a complete fucking mystery and always go wrong.
Also how do you motivate yourself to learn something knowing that even if you spend years learning if you're still going to be useless, and even if you are good at it, no employers are going to hire someone with no proper qualifications and who's spent the last ten years of their life doing manual labour?
I can just imagine the interview:
INTERVIEWER: "So, you've got no qualifications, absolutely no experience, no references, and you're applying for a job where we have a hundred applicants all with degrees and 10+ years experience?"
ME: "Yes"
INTERVIEWER: "Fuck off"
So young geeks/nerds/tools - Talk to girls, ask them out, you have nothing to lose, but your virginity.
Except your self-respect, and your confidence, when you're rejected and humiliated time and time again, and the dawning realisation that you're completely unattractive to the opposite sex.
Take my advice: never talk to girls, then at least you can use that as an excuse as to why you don't get any success. Delusion is often better than the awful truth.
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life."
Actually, it is. High school was shit. Really fucking awful. When people said the above, I didn't believe it, I thought: "Like it can get any worse...". Since then it's been all downhill, every year is worse than the last. When they say your schooldays are the best of your life, they actually meant it.
However that begs the question that if you're having fun and enjoying your life, is that time really wasted? In order for time to be well spent, does it have to have a tangable end result?
There's nothing in High School worth studying. It's all bullshit busy work.
Let's see... Trig, calculus, physics, chemistry.
I can't recall a single time in my entire life where I've EVER used any of that. Never. It has had absolutely NO use in my life, and it probably never will. All that time learning crap like maths and science I could have been doing something useful.
Economics, history. Required to understand that most politicians are either fools or liars.
You can realise that without going to school at all.
English (i.e. literature). Mostly a waste of time. Not once did a teacher explain what made some writing good and other bad. The stuff we had to read was almost always dull. I bought and read books on my own (mostly SF), and as poorly written as it was, it was better than "classical literature".
Yeah, English lessons seem to always go the following way:
1) Find the lamest, blandest, crappest poem ever written by the worst author ever.
2) Over-analyse it again and again until it's completely destroyed.
3) Write a load of crap about it that no-one's going to read anyway.
Going to a four-year college and getting a degree really isn't all that important anymore. Yeah, you get a job, yeah you get money, and yeah you have fun but honestly the pay off in the end really isn't all that worth it.
I'd say that having fun, having a decent job and having money are probably some of the most important things you can get. I'd say it's definitely worth it. I dropped out of college after the first year and now I'm stuck working in a dead-end factory job, probably for the rest of my life, which means I'll never have any fun or have any money. Compared to that, I'd say that college and a decent office job is the better option.
Also I think that four years of drinking/partying is better than four years rotting away in a filthy factory.
I am a Linux Systems Administrator of 20 machines for a small time company in a small town of 50,000(which is the county seat). I command a salary of $28,000 and I am told to like it.
Sounds alright to me. That's a lot more than average, and you're sat down all day, it's not like you're really working, and you get decent hours rather than 12 hour night shifts. What is there to complain about? I'd swap my position for yours in a heartbeat.
The concern I have is: surely the next time you go for a piss someone will just rob your computer. And how do you get on the Internet in a cafe?
>>Livejournal is something like 65:35 female:male.
>It's cute to see such naivety still on the internet. Never played any MMORPGs, huh?
This is different to MMORPGs, MMORPGs are generally a male domain, with men pretending to be women to get favours. On the other hand, blogs involve things women like doing, i.e. fucking going on and on about shit no-one cares about.
Employers who say "blah, I own the copyright I can do anything I want" quickly discover that no-one wants to work for them.
As long as there are a hundred people wanting to work in making computer games for every available job, there will always be people wanting to work for computer game companies, no matter how 'evil' they are.
Re: http://www.mutablerealms.com/screenshots/full_062. jpg
I'm no graphics expert, but the main thing that struck me was the way the ground sort of 'blurred' as it goes into the background. I don't know why they've done this, even the buildings in the background aren't blurred, so you have jagged buildings sitting on smooth blurred ground.
On closer inspection, the edges are terrible. See the horse for instance, it looks like it's been badly cut and pasted from another picture, with the cutting-boundary drawn by hand with a faulty mouse. By a blind person.
The shadowing is backwards as well. Notice how the buildings on the right cast (bad) shadows to the left, but the horse casts a shadow to the right. Or maybe the world has several suns or something.
Automation will free us from mindless, boring, and/or dangerous work
Free us to do what? When one job is obsoleted another doesn't suddenly take its place. So when all the factory workers lose their jobs, what happens to them and their families?
Aren't we all so fortunate to be alive now?
As a factory worker, I'd say no. It might be alright for you computer types with your massive wages, but there are other people in the world you know.
When companies export IT jobs to India, there's page after page of slashdot posts criticising it, complaining how it's unfair because it will mean computer programmers being put out of jobs. But when some fancy new robot comes along that puts other people out of jobs, you don't care.
Don't forget getting a OS/software setup that works properly with all your hardware, including the remote control, and a way to link it up to your telly properly.
The natural state of affairs for intellectual property is that it is worthless. If caveman A invents a bow and arrow, caveman B is free to make their own copy without worrying about patent infringement. However, caveman A still invents the bow and arrow because he's tired of running after rabbits and hitting them on the head with a club. It's much easier to shoot from a distance.
However this is a lot different to the current state of affairs. Caveman A uses his bow and arrow to get his food. Even if every other caveman is using his invention, he can still kill rabbits and use them to feed himself.
But if a software developer writes a program, it might solve a problem, but if everyone else rips it off rather than paying him for it, how does he feed himself? He can't use the software to acquire food, or money to pay his bills/mortgage/credit card payments, unless people pay him for his software.
We don't live in the Stone Age anymore, people generally survive by exchanging work for money, which they then use to pay for things.
You've never had REAL Pizza.
What is it with these angry zealots? They get all foamed up at the mouth just because you like different food to them. You don't get this sort of attitude about many other things. Is anyone else sick of people insulting people about their choice of pizza, going on and on about how people as clever as they are know that the best pizza comes from some place near where they live? As if it matters, or that it's anything more than their opinion?
Who defines what 'real' pizza is anyway? Just because it's made in some obscure place using an 'authentic' recipe doesn't mean it's any good. You can make crap pizza from great ingredients and vice versa.
Pizza made from decent sauce instead of the slightly flavored tomato paste Dominoes uses.
Sauce? On pizza? You don't put sauce on REAL pizza, you're obviously eating some horrible dumbed-down pizza etc... See how easy it is to be arrogant and pretentious about a bloody bit of food that doesn't matter?
At the end of the day, it's only pizza, it's just some cheap greasy crappy junk food you eat when you're drunk or you can't be bothered to cook anything. There's no need to get so worked up about something that just ends up in the toilet.
Do all the jobs require an appitutude test? Or just the high ranking ones?
Almost every job does.
What, every one? Even the bloke who cleans the toilets, or the women in the canteen? You need 14 interviews to see if you can cook bacon and eggs?
If all the dictionaries report that a word is being used in the language, then either there is a conspiracy among dictionary editors, or the word is being used in the language.
Just because they report language, doesn't mean they report it accurately or only include words that are actually used. There are many ridiculous entries in dictionaries. It wouldn't be so bad, but people take dictionaries as an authority and use them to justify using obscure foreign words, when all they really want to do is look clever.
I'd like to argue further but I've got other things to do today, so I'll end by saying this:
You're a cunt.
But having been in English dictionaries for over 100 years does.
No it doesn't. Dictionaries are not an authority. Someone putting their pet foreign word into their dictionary doesn't make it an English word. Dictionaries are only supposed to report language usage, they don't define it.
English has a larger vocabulary than any other language. Nobody knows them all.
Well if there's a foreign word that next to no-one has heard of, and no-one uses, does it become an English word just because the occasional person uses it in an English sentence?